Quelques considérations sur le problème du logement des clercs à travers le prisme des relations avec les laïcs dans l’Antiquité tardive

Abstract

If the ecclesiastical canons stated that travelling clerics could stay the night at the domus ecclesiae of their colleagues, the same norms condemn clerics who slept in hostels - with the notable exception of the deversorium - because they were considered as dens of vice. An analysis of hagiographic and patristic primary sources allows us to discover a new dimension of the relationships between clerics and laymen. When these religious men were invited into the domus of the rich Christians, they could also spend the night there. The following article deals with a large collection of late-antique texts, in which clerics - mostly bishops - are presented as having spent a night outside their domus ecclesiae. Drawing up a typology of the clerics’ travelling residencies enables us to assess how these journeys demonstrate political and social strategies of the clergy, according to the places where they stayed on short-term visits, between the 4th and the 6th centuries, throughout all the Roman Empire.