Ruling peasants: colonate and mobility in the later Roman Empire

• Autor(a) principal: da Silva, Uiran Gebara
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Anos 90 (Online)
• Texto Completo: https://seer.ufrgs.br/index.php/anos90/article/view/65579
• topic: Colonato; Campesinato; Império Romano tardio.; História; Estado; Leis; Classes Subalternas; Colonate; Peasantry; Later Roman Empire

The “colonate laws” were traditionally seen as a coherent set of judicial determinations aimed at binding peasants in the land between the 3rd and 5th centuries A.D. Those laws fulfilled a central role in the historiographical construct that, throughout the whole 20th century, stated a downgrading of the social status and a decrease in comfort of Later Roman peasants. This article readdresses the problems that surround the use of legal documentation, following the debates initiated in the 1980s that deconstructed the previous historiographical perspective on the colonate laws. Such readdress has as its goal to evaluate how much the actual state of the question still can affect the investigation and the historical representations of the Late Roman rural workers, their communities, and the several configurations of power (local or imperial) with which they had to deal in their daily lives.