Invisibility, silence, and absences are well known obstacles that scholars face when researching the history of marginalized individuals. Attempts to name are often considered an expression of care and giving back individuals their humanity. Yet researchers have invested little effort into understanding how namelessness itself can be used to produce knowledge. Of course, scholars have not completely ignored nameless individuals: anonymity has been examined by literary scholars, and much work has been done on faceless groups, crowds and mobs as one way to capture past agency. Studies that have attempted to comprehensively catalogue and examine the agency of nameless individuals are however exceedingly rare, in particular in studies of the premodern world. This is because nameless individuals are often simply overlooked, mentioned only in passing or must be inferred from context. Existing methods for the study of historical person data only allow us to list or aggregate nameless individuals, an inadequate means of understanding their historical agency.

Our project addresses this challenge in a comparative, diachronic and multidisciplinary fashion. It does not only establish a previously unacknowledged field but literally explores the epistemological value of the unknowable. Our hypothesis is that namelessness is historically contingent on and conditioned by external factors such as literary and cultural conventions. Depending on the situation, the society, or individuals involved, it is a form of domination and repression, or a refuge and marker of privilege. This range needs to be examined and compared systematically and diachronically to open up an untapped pool of person data for historical study. The project opens a window onto the majority of individuals in the historical record: individuals who were subordinate and marginalised and who have been largely ignored by generations of scholars.

Methodologically, we will investigate what analogue or digital tools we will need to develop to confront namelessness in historical person data. It seeks to open up traditional approaches, such as close reading or prosopography, and new technologies, such as network analysis and AI name entity recognition, for the study of namelessness. How can we accept namelessness as a historical given while still marking the existence of these individuals? 

Epistemologically, we will examine how we can use records on nameless individuals to produce new knowledge about past societies, using case studies from ancient, early medieval and American contexts of slavery. How does namelessness shape our understanding of the agency of historical subjects? And how can we write histories about past humans without names?

Ethically, this process requires meta-scientific reflections on our responsibility as researchers. Naming is often seen as a way to humanize historical individuals, but the act of naming – including by scholars – has also been described as an assertion of power that can recreate social inequalities and stigmatize individuals. Acknowledging namelessness may therefore respect past individuals' human dignity, but may also risk unduly reducing them to further unsanctioned identity markers, such as gender or status. The question of whether to name or not to name also speaks to our inability as researchers to ask historical subjects for consent. How can we decolonize the violence inherent in naming without reproducing other forms of epistemic violence? Is our task as scholars to name the nameless or to respect namelessness?

We will pursue these questions through interdisciplinary retreats, workshops, co-taught modules, a co-written research guide and special issue in an international, peer-review journal to jointly develop a robust set of protocols for identifying and analyzing the nameless, and in this way to lay the groundwork for a different "history from below". In short, this project will, at the same time, revolutionize reflections on even such seemingly basic research tasks as compiling a book index and pave the way for future large-scale collaborations on how to responsibly research the nameless in larger interdisciplinary projects.