Cinnamon Ducasse

Cinnamon Ducasse is a legal historian of the later Roman Empire, specialising in the intersections of law, religion and economics in Late Antiquity. Her research focusses on how law was mobilised by imperial, ecclesiastical and lay actors in their economic practices. She is particularly interested in questions of how and when law is produced, activated, changed and developed, as well as in the place of legal ideas and action within broader social processes.

Dr. Ducasse holds a BA in Arts and Humanities from Birkbeck College (University of London) and an MLitt in Legal and Constitutional Studies from the University of St Andrews. She completed her PhD in Medieval History at St Andrews in 2025, as a member of the ERC project ‘Common Law, Civil Law, Customary Law: Consonance, Divergence and Transformation from the 11th to 13th Centuries’. Her thesis examined the meanings, administration and ownership of ecclesiastical and monastic property in the constitutions of the emperor Justinian I (r. 527-565 CE).

She is currently a postdoctoral researcher on the project "A01: Ambiguous Property from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages" within the Collaborative Research Centre: Structural Change of Property. 

Amassing Property on Earth, Storing Wealth in Heaven: Comparing Late Roman Legal and Extra-Legal Sources (Fourth to Sixth Centuries CE)

A central ambiguity is hard-wired into the core of the Christian ascetic project. Ascetics did not only need to (barely) survive, but also to perform charity work, and therefore needed to produce a surplus. As such, asceticism, particularly in its institutionalised form, monasticism, was characterized by wealth accumulation. This project proposes to examine hagiographical evidence through the lens of this ambivalence, seeking evidence of on-the-ground practical and ideological solutions. Originating in the fourth century and becoming quickly popular, hagiographies were narrative biographies of Christian saints expressed in a formulaic style, with the donation of wealth and its reward through miracles being major tropes. The Saint’s Lives are richly detailed in their descriptions of the property transactions made by wealthy and, in part, extremely wealthy Roman citizens seeking purity through poverty. As well as providing evidence of transactions of highly valuable and varied properties, these sources give a unique view into the thought-world in which such exchanges took place, revealing as yet underappreciated relationship between economic thought and practice. This provided readers, however, not only with models of economic behaviour, but also with explicit advice on how best to distribute their buildings, lands, cattle, slaves and money. Late Roman law, particularly sixth-century imperial constitutions, contain complex provisions regarding economic transactions involving churches, monasteries and individuals involved in their administration, while late antique legal papyri demonstrate great variety in ecclesiastical and monastic property practices. This project will consider the Saints’ Lives against legal evidence, approaching this non-legal literature as a witness to property transactions undertaken against a backdrop of complex ambivalence around material wealth.