The market in ancient Greece should be understood as a specific institutional construct, that of the city-state, which allowed its citizens to exercise private property rights guaranteed by law. By extension, free foreigners were also acknowledged these rights, which however extended to the private ownership of human beings (slavery). The city-state also created the conditions for an unusually high division of labour. Each city was a market space of its own, with its own rules and logic, which could include the control over sales margins and even sometimes the establishment of maximum prices for some perishable fresh goods. The network of hundreds of Greek city-states also created the conditions for the development of an original form of international market.

The centuries after the so-called collapse of the Mycenaean palace administration from the twelfth to the eighth centuries BCE saw several transformations of social and economic structures. These had an impact on the economic performance in the period. It is also significant that during this period there was no attempt to restore palatial administration, but instead Early Iron Age communities built new social and economic relationships on household units that could be understood as adaptable social-political organisations with fluid boundaries. Moreover, the Early Iron Age should not be seen as a period of stagnation but one characterised by adaptive and resilient features. These led to the well-documented visibility of the archaeological record of the eighth century BCE.

Babylonia held a crucial position in a network of overland and naval routes, connecting Arabia, India, and the Graeco-Bactrian empire with the Levant, Syria, and Anatolia via the Fertile Crescent in the west. This network enabled the royal administration to combine the functions of trade and communication with settlement politics, the melioration of agriculture, and the supply of war zones. In this latter role, the Babylonian economy might have played an important part in Seleucid warfare, despite Babylonians never being actively involved in military campaigns. A new Graeco-Babylonian elite with particular demands, the dynamic development of settlements, the network of trade routes, communication, mobility connecting the western parts of the empire in the Aegean with the east, and increased monetization may have provided the conditions for some economic growth in Hellenistic Babylonia. Nevertheless, Babylonia had already been a very productive and economically dynamic region in the Achaemenid period. There were certainly great continuities from the Persian and Seleucid empires, and one may wonder whether the efforts of the early Seleucid kings to improve lines of communication, temple economies, and monetary exchange aimed at regaining the levels of prosperity that had already been achieved before Alexander’s conquests.

The chapter surveys the economy of Asia Minor from the late archaic period to the end of the Hellenistic era. Asia Minor forms the largest land mass in the northern Mediterranean and is characterized by a diverse geography with different levels of integration into the Greek world and its economy. Throughout time, urbanization significantly intensified; nevertheless, many regions preserved a rural character. Agriculture was most important, in both the land of the poleis and land controlled by the Achaemenid and Hellenistic kings. Production was directed to local needs, but some agrarian products also served as exports; non-agrarian production was less significant. Asia Minor was rich in natural resources, and fishing was important in a few coastal cities. The birthplace of coinage in the late seventh century, Asia Minor saw the circulation of many coinages over time and was highly monetarized at least by the end of the Hellenistic period. These coinages mirror the frequent changes in a political landscape that was characterized by different strata of authority, from the royal administration down to the city-states and villages. Through taxation, public expenditures, and by securing an institutional framework, these authorities shaped the complex conglomerate of Asia Minor’s economy.

This chapter examines the networks within which ancient Greek coins were produced and circulated from the perspective of formal network analysis, a methodological tool that is becoming increasingly widespread within ancient studies. In particular this chapter considers the problems of the object biographies as they pertain to networks, the agents involved in various networks, the process of network evolution and devolution, and network scale.

Although significant progress has been made in dealing with ancient economies through the establishing of new methodological approaches (like the New Institutional Economics), old-school Political Economy still plays an important role. It endeavours among other things to describe and evaluate the causes which lead to economic growth, thereby including factors which cannot be subsumed under the category of ‘institutions’ (exclusively focused on by the NIE) like demography or climate. Recently, this traditional approach has been intensively adopted to explain and measure the growth of ancient Greek economies between the ninth and fourth centuries, today viewed as an established fact in contrast to the older consensus, which was characterised by scepticism regarding the capability of ancient societies to generate sustainable growth. This chapter presents the most important factors that were (supposedly) conducive to growth and describes and their mutual interplay and interferences. In a further section, some methodological and empirical problems of the way 'ancient growth' is quantified in contemporary research are discussed. In a final section, some thoughts are offered on geo-economic factors, assumed by the author to have had a decisive impact in bringing about 'growth' or concentrations of wealth in some areas and milieus.

In this chapter, I emphasise and try to explain the importance of historical demography for economic history, but also its relative neglect by ancient historians until very recently. Demography involves a range of quantitative measures that are useful both as proxies for economic performance and in comparison. Population sizes and trends also have explanatory power for past economic changes. Some general points about the relationship between population and economy, and what changed and what stayed the same over the last millennium BCE are followed by some more specific observations about the major periods of Greek history. The importance of environmental factors is particularly emphasised, and urbanization is a persistent theme.

This chapter discusses the economic developments occurring within the Ptolemaic empire (323–30 BCE), of which Egypt was the core province. It explores how state formation affected economic development and how Ptolemaic imperialism, demography, and the interaction between Egyptian and Greek social networks were factors of economic change and economic exploitation. After an overview of past and current approaches to the economy of the Ptolemaic empire and of the geography of the empire, it assesses the cost and benefits of military conquests and the management of migrations patterns and new settlements by the Ptolemies, who increased their revenues and reduced the cost of their army through land allotments to cleruchs. The political economy of the Ptolemies relied on a complex tax system, with some documents pointing to a centralized taxation of the provinces, and innovative but also unusual monetary policies, such as closed-currency system based on a lower weight standard than the Attic standard in Egypt, Cyprus, and Syria-Phoenicia. The chapter concludes with examples of the synergistic relationship between empire, warfare, and trade and between the public and private spheres of the economy, and sketches the purchasing power of different economic groups in Egypt.

UNDERST ANDING THE FUNCTION of media in the early Middle Ages remains a work in progress. While media as a critical approach has much to offer early medieval studies, and with a small (but growing) list of exceptions from recent medieval scholarship notwithstanding, the history, study, and theory of media remains largely conceived of as a discipline of modernity. Media studies today intersect both with theoretical aspects of new materialism, and the cyborg-manifest, techno-culture of the posthuman (i.e., what, following the social notions of Bruno Latour, may be considered the material ecologisation of humanity outside traditional definitions of the ‘human’). Medieval humanity is similarly defined through complex transactions of the material, technological, and ideological practices; this (post)humanity is in part defined by the way, as corporeal entities, medieval bodies also function as media, not as senders or receivers, but as a medium for information and communication within the ecology of premodern media discourse.

In times of cultural disruption or social breakdown, early medieval bodies operate as physically hybrid media, and as informational focal points for crises of numerous kinds – criminal, moral, national, salvific – in order to highlight these crises and then propose some form of ideological and practical correction. In early medieval England, literary, legal, and historical texts highlight the cultural significance of bodies qua media: the mounting of Grendel's arm in the Old English epic Beowulf, hagiographic accounts of the martyrdom of King Edmund by Viking invaders in 869, and the spiritual and juridical fragmentation of bodies in tenth- and eleventh-century excommunication formulae and law codes. The violence done to these bodies is more than an individual physical act, and also more than just symbolic or prosthetic moments rhetorically appropriating and extending the body as a textual trope. Such moments of somatic violence reveal the medieval body to be a material node in a social network of secular, spiritual, and juridical representations preoccupied with relationships between bodies, body parts, money, worship, words, and information; to employ Armand Mattelart's term, a constellation of communicational practices.

In Mattelart's formulation, information and the media technologies which carry it must be considered together with cultural practices that share their circulatory qualities, and the line between media and anything else that moves across or through a social landscape remains indistinct.

THE COMPLEXITYOF the medieval world is often obscured by the tendency of many modern scholars to focus on specific areas of research, only occasionally stepping outside the boundaries of their chosen discipline. Despite teaching across the period, Old English critics rarely look forward to later texts, Middle English scholars generally look back only so far and, often, neither looks to continental traditions unless they are searching for sources. But medieval textual traditions were not so isolated, and even though Old English changed over time, giving way to Middle English in its various dialects, they developed into new forms of writing and expression that reflected different social concerns and tastes which crossed geographical and chronological boundaries. One of the strongest cross-cultural currents was that between England and the Low Countries, which exchanged people, ideas, textiles, and were often allied against larger enemies. Both English and Middle Dutch textual traditions owe a great debt to the corpus of medieval French literature, often working from the same (or similar) sources; but they also adapted ideas, motifs, and tropes to suit their own audiences and occasionally shared their literary endeavors between them. Unfortunately, scholarship on these cross-cultural exchanges is not always accessible, especially if it is written in modern Dutch. As Geert Claassens explains, ‘In short, the language barrier that exists … prevents many foreign scholars from becoming acquainted with a broad corpus of texts that in the Middle Ages formed part of a much more homogenous European literary culture’. Few scholars have contributed as much to this wider view of medieval England and its cultural contacts across the channel than David F. Johnson. His work traces the textual traditions of Old English, especially in manuscript production, through later medieval romances in both England and the Low Countries, highlighting the connections between texts, motifs, and themes. This volume takes the work of Johnson as its starting point, investigating the intricacies of early English manuscript production and preservation, illuminating the variations in reinterpreting Old English poetry, particularly Beowulf, and tracking those complexities through later Arthurian English and Middle Dutch romances and drama.

IN CHRÉTIEN DE Troyes’ romance Perceval or Le Conte du Graal (The Story of the Grail) (c. 1180–90), during Perceval's first encounter with the mystery of the Grail in the Grail Castle, he fails to ask the crucial questions and finds himself expelled from the castle on the next morning without further explanation. He then encounters a grieving maiden whose lover has just been killed and who asks what has happened to him in the last few days. Perceval tells her that he was shown the Grail mystery but that, out of politeness, he asked nothing about what he saw. She then asks Perceval his name and after Perceval answers, she reproves him for his failure to speak and thereby heal the Fisher king. Curiously, while Perceval names himself for the first time in the romance, at this point Chrétien insists that he does not really know his name, but rather guesses it correctly. The maiden asks:

AROUND 1250 THE ROMAN VAN WALEWEIN, the masterpiece of Flemish Arthurian literature, appeared. This romance of more than 11,000 verses was written by two authors. A poet who calls himself Penninc started and wrote most of it, and a Pieter Vostaert completed the work. The protagonist of the romance is Arthur's nephew Walewein, the Flemish counterpart of the French Gauvain. The story is about a quest he undertakes to provide the king with a precious chess-set. The hero experiences adventures of a familiar kind, as in the episode which elaborately relates his confrontation with the Red Knight who abuses a damsel (3676–4915). What makes the romance special, however, is the fairytale character of Walewein's quest.

The romance opens with a marvelous event that takes place at court before the eyes of Arthur and his knights:

Suddenly the chess-set flies away again, after which Arthur expresses his desire to possess it. Walewein sets off in search of the valuable object, which brings him to the castle of King Wonder, who owns the chess-set. He is willing to give it to Walewein, but the hero must first deliver him the Sword with the Two Rings, a miraculous weapon owned by King Amoraen. While at Walewein is at his castle, Amoraen agrees to give him the Sword, provided his guest brings him Ysabele, a beautiful princess who lives in a castle in faraway Endi. To get there, Walewein needs the help of a marvelous character: Roges, a fox who can speak, and who, by the end of the romance, turns back into a handsome prince.

In the romance there are three moments when a character assumes the role of narrator. First Walewein, when he reports to King Wonder about the chess-set that appeared at Arthur's court. Then King Amoraen, who describes Ysabele, the castle where she lives, and the garden in which she takes her leisure. The third narrator is the fox Roges; he tells a story about his childhood as a prince and about the woman who magically transformed him.

TWO SCRAPS OF parchment, each about 3½ inches long and an inch high (90 × 23mm and 95 × 22mm respectively), were presented publicly for the first and perhaps last time as Lot 1 at an auction at Sotheby's in London on July 8, 2014. They were described as

One fragment has parts of John 8:52–53 on the recto:3

And part of John 9:2 on the verso:

The second fragment, in the same hand and ink and approximately the same size, has the remains of a single line from John 8:54 on its recto:

The blank space below the line and the somewhat elongated descenders of f, s, and þ indicate that this was the last line on the page; the verso is blank.

The fragments, recently discovered in an unidentified private collection outside the United Kingdom, were reused as endbands in a sixteenth-century English binding; the second fragment is still attached to a scrap of binding with some stitching. The two fragments were sold for £128,500 (about $200,000 at the time) to a private collector in the United States.

These fragments are important for numerous reasons. The first is their rarity. Very few new manuscripts of Old English [hereafter OE] are discovered these days, and still fewer go on the auction block. The Sotheby's fragments may well be the only newly-found OE to emerge for public sale for many years to come. For this reason alone, they are worth close consideration, despite their small size.

THE ALFREDIAN CORPUS includes the Old English translations commissioned or completed by Alfred the Great in his mission of cultural, religious, and educational reform in the latter half of the ninth century. In recent years, it has become clear that one text in the corpus – the Dialogues, understood to be translated from Gregory the Great's Latin Dialogi into Old English by Bishop Wærferth of Worcester – suffers from a lack of scholarly attention. The recent discovery of a set of printer's proofs from Heinrich Krebs's never-completed and never-published 1878 edition of this Old English text may enable further study into the missed opportunities and watershed moments that led to the Dialogues’ later reception as inconsequential for scholarly research.

Few have taken notice of the Dialogues’ sorry state, but its value is championed especially by David Johnson, whose vita tells the story of his dedication to the text; presentations, chapters, and articles have all been useful venues for proclaiming the value of the work on linguistic, literary, and historical grounds. He has considered possible audiences for the Dialogues, highlighting the work's importance in the circles of King Alfred and Ælfric, and placed Wærferth's translation of Gregory the Great's Dialogi alongside Bede's Old English Historia Ecclesiastica to review and revise connections between these translations and Alfred's program. Most recently, Johnson has tracked reception of passages on divine justice by analyzing the Otho C.i manuscript of the Dialogues’ pattern of later punctuation emendations, thought to have been added by the Tremulous Hand of Worcester, the thirteenth-century scribe and prolific glosser of Old English texts in both Middle English and Latin. Johnson went so far as to work with his son, Ian Johnson, to develop a program that allows for automated tracking of these haphazardly sketched marginal and interlinear additions, and his ‘Tremulator’ (not yet available for public use) allows him to quickly recognize and analyse patterns in the Tremulous Hand of Worcester's textual interventions.

In his analytical work, Johnson exhorts other scholars not to forget the Dialogues. As is often the case with ‘many didactic texts’, he warns, ‘its historical relevance in the successive periods of its copying has yet to be interpreted and appreciated fully’. But nowhere is he more explicit about this call than in ‘Why Ditch the Dialogues?