Prosopography of the Byzantine World (PBW )

Project start date: 2003-04

Project end date: 2006-12

Prosopography of the Byzantine World (PBW) aims to record all surviving information about every individual mentioned in Byzantine textual sources, together with as many as possible of the individuals recorded in seal sources, in the period 1025-1261. The current online database is the first major result of PBW, a project covering the period AD 1025-1180, and represents a continuation of prosopographical work originally inspired by A.H.M. Jones in 1950, and sponsored since then by the British Academy. It followed work done by John Martindale, and also involving CCH (Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London) support, on the Prosopography of the Byzantine Empire I (PBE I) which covered the period 641-867 CE. With the decision to concentrate on the period starting from AD 1025 for this phase of the work, the project named PBW, in recognition of the very heterogeneous geographical area that would need to be covered for the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Indeed, recent work, which has looked to integrating materials from some Arabic sources that are connected to the Byzantine Empire, has begun to explore issues that arise when the locus of study is extended even more broadly. As with other prosopographical projects involving CCH, PBW adopted the "factoid prosopography" model which was originally developed out of the work of PBE I. Dynamic generation of web pages from the data for web delivery. For the previous PBE project, a set of HTML pages were generated that were put onto a CD (published by Ashgate)