To browse Academia. Appropriate responses to environmental and social crises-by individuals, communities, governments, religious and charitable organizationsare increasingly under focus in the twenty-rst century.
The focus of our research is episcopal crisis management in Late Antiquity, based principally on bishops' letters in Greek and Latin from the fth and sixth centuries The time-frame has been chosen to exclude at one end the letters of John Chrysostom and at the other end the register of Gregory the Great, both of whose letters have received recent scholarly attention.
All of John's surviving letters date from his period of exile in Armenia , a curious phenomenon which skews the evidence of his epistolographical activity. Due to the rationale behind the collection of John's letters we have no information whatsoever in his epistolary corpus about his time as a priest in Antioch, and no systematic data about his period as archbishop of Constantinople.
In general, then, we are thrown back on the evidence from his homilies for crises other than that induced by his own exile from his church in Constantinople. For this reason we have excluded John's letters from the corpus under discussion here. These letters are not fruitful for evidence of other kinds of crisis since they derive from John's period of exile, not from his time in episcopal o ce. This introduction frames a collection of four papers, originally presented at the 13th Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity conference, that examine late antique episcopal responses to disaster, typically military defeats caused by the barbarians.
To contextualize what follows, this essay begins by introducing various ways disaster researchers define disaster, as well as the related concepts of hazard and vulnerability.
