About

Noel Lenski is the Dunham Professor of Classics and History and serves as Chair of the Department of Classics at Yale University. He studied Classics at The Colorado College, earning his BA in 1989, and completed his MA and PhD in Classics and Ancient History at Princeton in 1995. His research primarily focuses on Roman history, with a particular emphasis on the history of the later Roman Empire. Lenski's scholarly interests include power relations across all levels of society, from emperors to slaves, and his work spans broad areas of Late Antiquity, including political, military, social, economic, religious, cultural, and art history.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• History
• Ancient history
• Law
• Art
• Economic history
• Archaeology
• Literature
• Economy
• Economics
• Theology
• Ethnology
• Anthropology
• Business
• Classics
• Philosophy

Selected publications

• Rights in Late Ancient Law?

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2025-11-27

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• Germanic Law and the Practice of Slaveholding in the Post-Roman West

  2025-05-19

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding
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• :<i>Human Trafficking in Medieval Europe: Slavery, Sexual Exploitation, and Prostitution</i>

  Speculum · 2023-06-30

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• Slavery in the Roman Empire

  Springer eBooks · 2023 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • History

  Abstract The Roman Empire developed one of the largest and most economically and culturally integrated systems of slavery in world history. It thrived on a remarkably robust supply stream that included enslavement by birth, capture, sale from foreign and domestic sources, the reclaiming of exposed infants, and—in late antiquity—self-sale, child sale, and debt bondage. Enslavement was imposed upon people from all regions, inside and outside the empire, and was never inflicted exclusively on a particular racial or ethnic group. Those enslaved to Rome worked in agriculture, industry, service, and even knowledge production, allowing them to be the primary workforce behind the generation of elite wealth. Escape from slavery could at times involve resistance, including everything from open revolt to flight, but Roman society was also remarkably generous with manumission. This and many other features reflect a hybridity between ancient patterns of captive integration and modern habits of slave exclusion.

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• 2. New Paths to Power: The Bipartite Division of Italy and Its Realignment of Society and Economy in the Fourth Century

  Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2023-10-13

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• Moving The Mail: The Status And Operations Of Letter Carriers In The <i>Collectio Avellana</i>

  Giornale italiano di filologia. Bibliotheca · 2023-01-01

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  This paper assembles a prosopography of the persons who carried the correspondence preserved in the Collectio Avellana, then analyzes this catalog in order to determine the status and operations of letter carriers. It shows that all appear to have been freeborn and most were of middling to high status in the ecclesiastical or imperial bureaucracy. This reflects the fact that most of the letters in the Collectio were exchanged as part of high-level diplomatic negotiations between the bishops of Rome and leaders in the imperial or ecclesiastical hierarchy who resided elsewhere. The letters were carried sometimes by individuals, at others by small groups of up to six identified persons, some of whom were sent because of their status and familiarity with the political and doctrinal details being discussed, some because of the speed at which they could travel – rates of up to an average of seventy kilometers per day are attested. The study closes with some of the complexities of letter carrying revealed in the Collectio, especially the crucial role letter carriers played as actors in the negotiations described in the materials they conveyed and their responsibilities as guardians, curators, and even editors for the physical objects (not just letters but sometimes also gifts) they were charged with moving rapidly across vast distances.

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• Slavery among the Visigoths

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • History
  • Literature

  The question of Visigothic slavery has generally been treated in the context of larger studies on the Visigoths or of the Mediterranean economy rather than studies devoted to slavery. Even when it has been examined as a thing unto itself, it has tended to get folded into larger narratives of the development of social relations in the early Middle Ages. Marxist historians, such as Abilio Barbero, Marcelo Vigil, and Chris Wickham, have attempted to fit the evidence into a historical materialist narrative that posits a decline of slavery and slaveholding in the post-Roman world as states contracted and serfs or peasants replaced slaves as the primary agricultural producers. This narrative has been countered by French social historians, especially Georges Duby and Pierre Bonnassie, who argued that slavery continued to predominate in the early medieval West, giving way to serfdom only in the tenth century.

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• The Late Roman Colonate

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2022-10-20

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  Abstract The ‘bound colonate’ is a subject of controversy among scholars, some of whom argue that it existed as a new status between free and slave, while others feel it was merely a fiscal concern that has been exaggerated into a historiographic myth. A survey of the evidence confirms that the bound colonate grew out of fiscal registration in the late third century but then took on a life of its own as a third status of semi-servility in the following century. It had become fully articulated by the early fifth century such that the many peasants enmeshed in it were compelled to live as permanent tenants bound to the land on which they were born and burdened with numerous impediments to their freedom. The bound colonate survived intact in the eastern empire through the sixth century but was modified in various forms in the post-Roman successor states of the West.

  PublisherDOI

• JAMES CORKE-WEBSTER, EUSEBIUS AND EMPIRE: CONSTRUCTING CHURCH AND ROME IN THE <i>ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY</i>. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xvii + 346. <scp>isbn</scp> 9781108474078. £90.

  The Journal of Roman Studies · 2021-11-01

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• Seruitus, seruus

  Augustinus-Lexikon online · 2021-12-16

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Frequent coauthors

• Catherine M. Cameron

  6 shared

• Kim Bok-rae

  5 shared

• Robert Gudmestad

  Colorado State University

  5 shared

• Fernando Santos‐Granero

  Smithsonian Institution

  5 shared

• Paul E. Lovejoy

  5 shared

• Theresa A. Singleton

  5 shared

• Matthew S. Hopper

  University of Minnesota

  5 shared

• Ehud R. Toledano

  5 shared

Awards & honors

• Winkler Prize