Accordingly, the inquiry endures as to what specific art galvanized the modern world’s original treatise on painting. How Alberti’s remarkable journey through the art of his past and present is both reflected and refracted in De pictura demands examination of the lines of transmission through education and career in Alberti’s decisive locales before Florence.

Chapter 1 raises the question of whether there was a decisive break in the nature of the city between Classical Antiquity and the post-Roman world of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. It is suggested that treating ‘the ancient city’ as typologically different from cities before or after obscures both the real degree of continuity and the perceptions of contemporaries of continuity. The chapter explores the historiography of the idea of the ancient city as a distinct type that goes back to Fustel de Coulanges, and has been identified by different schools of thought as religious, economic, political, and physical. Rather than thinking of ‘decline and fall’, or even ‘transformation’, a new approach is offered through resilience theory, that sees a continuous process of drawing on memories of the past and, through them, adaptation.

The Introduction provides an in-depth exploration of how late antique Christian communities in the Mediterranean reconciled their Roman and Christian identities through baptismal art. It raises pivotal questions: did such art serve to confirm both Roman and Christian identities? Could this art reflect a form of Christianity less orthodox due to its Roman cultural influences? Various case studies are presented, each spotlighting a different aspect of Roman cultural affiliation in baptismal spaces – ranging from the absence of explicitly Christian imagery to the inclusion of ‘pagan’ iconographies and classical motifs. Whether in Numidia, Lusitania, or Ravenna, these communities reveal a complex relationship with their Roman heritage, often challenging ecclesiastical norms. Despite the political disintegration of the western Roman Empire, the chapter underscores the extensive interconnectedness of the Mediterranean world, pointing out the shared cultural elements in baptismal art from the East to the far West. The chapter argues that these artistic choices are not mere coincidences but are indicative of a shared Roman culture that transcends geographical and political boundaries.

In 1995, on the Celian Hill in Rome, a team of conservators led by Dottoressa Andreina Draghi made a remarkable discovery in the fortified tower attached to the basilica of Santi Quattro Coronati. Concealed behind layers of whitewash in a vaulted hall were the remains of an extensive thirteenth-century fresco cycle (Figure I.1). The tower and hall originally formed part of a palace complex built for Stefano Conti, a high-ranking cardinal of the papal Curia who lived there from the early 1240s until his death in 1254. During this time, Cardinal Conti sponsored a vast program of murals that included the newfound hall frescoes, the well-known series of narrative paintings in the small chapel dedicated to Saint Sylvester, and a painted liturgical almanac in the chapel’s antechamber (Figures I.2 and I.3). To realize this program of fresco decorations, Conti hired the same teams of painters who had completed the large cycle of murals in the crypt of Anagni Cathedral a few years earlier.

An introductory chapter briefly outlines relevant historiography of courtier studies in general and analyses of elite female servants more narrowly. This introduction establishes important classifications of household servants and demonstrates how roles and terminology shifted over time as the royal court and household grew in both size and complexity over the course of the later Middle Ages. In addition to illuminating categories of female service, the introduction details the sources and methodology employed to produce this analysis of medieval English ladies-in-waiting, highlighting the goals, successes, and limits of this kind of prosopographical methodology. The introduction argues that an analysis of ladies-in-waiting offers insight into female social networks, gender dynamics at court, and issues of power, authority, and wealth, along with how women accessed these features, in late medieval society.

Widely considered to be an art today, music in the medieval Islamic world was categorized as a branch of the mathematical sciences; in fact, some philosophers and scholars of music went as far as linking music with medicine and astrology as part of an interconnected web of cosmological knowledge. Focusing on the science of music this book discusses how a non-European premodern intellectual tradition – in this case, the Islamic philosophical tradition – conceptualized science. Furthermore, it explores how this intellectual tradition produced “correct” scientific statements and how it envisioned science’s relationship with other bodies of knowledge. Finally, it investigates what made music a science in the medieval Islamic world by examining the ontological debates surrounding the nature of music as a scientific discipline as well as the epistemological tools and techniques that contributed to the production of musical knowledge during the medieval period (third/ninth–ninth/fifteenth centuries).

Marx summed up Europe’s many impacts on world history as showing “what human activity can bring about” – namely, the capacity to undo and remake the human world. Although we have become increasingly aware of the negative side of this release of human energies, in war, ecological destruction, and imperial domination, the positive one survives in the closer contact between peoples, modern industry’s potential to reduce poverty, and the expansion of practical knowledge and scientific understanding. Remaking the World argues that what put Europe at the center of these changes was first the division and fragmentation that persisted through much of its history and then the emergence of spheres of activity that were autonomous in the sense of regulating themselves by principles derived from the activities carried on within them, as opposed to “teleocratic” domains governed by norms that were generated outside themselves. Unlike other attempts to grasp European distinctiveness which focus chiefly on economics and industry, it gives equal attention to culture, science, and the politics of liberty, and makes comparisons based on substantial discussions of counterparts to these developments elsewhere.

Beginning with the problem of historical distance, the introduction charts a path from notes on the page to potent sound experiences, taking as a representative example the modern performance of a mass by Johannes Okeghem. In addition to defining counterpoint and explaining the term’s relevance to this study, the introduction sets up some of the book’s main questions while laying out a ground plan for what follows.

This chapter introduces how the study of the Merovingian kingdoms has developed since the sixteenth century. Merovingian history is not easily or self-evidently presented in the source material; it has had to be recovered and reconstructed. The historiographical survey is therefore important to understanding how writers and scholars have put that history together. It highlights some of the key political, confessional, theoretical, and methodological issues that have shaped how the period is interpreted, from the Magdeburg Centuriators of the Reformation to the Monumenta Germaniae Historica’s self-consciously ‘scientific’ approach to editing sources.

Artes Dictandi; use of French and of verse in letters; the verse epistle as a lyric genre; autobiographical ballade sequences; appropriation and imitation; doubt as between art and actuality

On his journey to the Franciscan General Council in 1259, Bonaventure, having recently been elected minister general of the Order, stopped off to make a spiritual retreat on Mt. Alverna, the place where St. Francis had seen a vision of a six-winged Seraph with an image of the crucified Christ at its center from which he received the stigmata. It was here that Bonaventure was inspired to write a six-stage ascent of the mind into God, associating each stage of the ascent with one of the six wings of the Searph. By creatively adapting contemporary preaching techniques of the so-called “modern sermon” or sermo modernus style, Bonaventure was able to craft a work of which Bernard McGinn would say: “Perhaps no other treatise of comparable size in the history of Western mysticism packs so much into one seamless whole.” I also broach an issue that has divided commentators on Bonaventure’s leadership of the Franciscan Order since the moment he took office as minister general. In helping to foster the Franciscans presence at the University of Paris and other leading universities, did Bonaventure lead the Order in a direction contrary to the spirit of St. Francis?

This introduction poses the central thesis of this volume: that the early Islamic empire was tied together by networks of social dependency that can be tracked through the linguistic and material traces of interconnectivity in our sources. It is suggested that the particular relationships that emerge from the granular case studies in this volume can illuminate the constituent parts of the early Islamic empire as a whole. Studies link material and textual sources, and in particular focus on the language and rhetoric used by sources to describe relations and interactions, and what they show of the modes, expressions and conditions that governed communication and interaction. It is suggested that empires are not ruled by top–down force alone, but that legitimacy and stability are created in various ways, both top–down and bottom–up.

The introduction sets forth the theoretical framework of the book by defining the two main lenses through which the material is viewed: scholarly masculinity and clerical masculinity. In doing so, it clarifies their relationship to other types of masculinities and highlights the role of animals in gender formation. This chapter also situates the book in its broader historiographical context, within both Byzantine and Western medieval Studies.

The Introduction gives a brief account of Bartolus’s life, explains the world of medieval law in which he worked, and then explains the political context of the northern and central Italian city republics for which he worked, and whose problems he sought to analyse. It explains that tyranny was Bartolus’s main preoccupation, even in the two treatises ostensibly concerned with other questions. It then presents the main arguments of his three political treatises and Bartolus’s main political theory in his academic legal commentaries, and describes the later influence of these treatises in European political theory. The Introduction also argues that Bartolus conceived of these three treatises as one composite treatment of tyranny.

Between the fifth and the ninth century ad, the church in Constantinople commemorated nine earthquakes that struck the city, prescribing an elaborate liturgical rite annually for each occasion.1 Worshippers sang specially composed hymns, heard carefully chosen passages from Scripture, and engaged in mass processions that retraced the steps of the city’s earthquake evacuation route. The rite, in its original fifth-century form, communicated a theology of earthquakes as divine and terrestrial judgment for collective sin but showed confidence in the power of collective repentance to turn aside natural disaster and divine wrath. These and other rituals and prayers related to earthquakes in Byzantine Constantinople were means by which city-dwellers could make meaning from disaster and renegotiate their relationships to God and the land around them in the face of its most destabilizing ecological characteristic: its seismicity.

Located on the North Anatolian Fault, Constantinople (today Istanbul) has experienced countless earthquakes over the course of its history.2

This introduction sets the stage for the different chapters of the volume by offering general considerations about the production and consumption of poetry in twelfth-century Byzantium.

It takes as its point of departure the period beginning from the moment that Alexios I Komnenos ascended the imperial throne in 1081 to the Latin sack of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade in 1204. This period saw an unprecedented growth in the production of poetry, as well as various innovative literary developments, including the emergence of vernacular poetry, the extensive use of poetry for ceremonial and didactic purposes at the imperial court and beyond, and the mixing of poetry and prose in so-called schede. While many poets were active in Constantinople, a large amount of the surviving poetry was written in places far away from the Byzantine capital, particularly in southern Italy and Sicily. The introduction discusses the social and intellectual contexts of twelfth-century poetry, addresses issues of geographical distribution and material circulation, and introduces some of the key figures and texts of the Komnenian period.

The introduction sets the book’s agenda: to offer a novel account of crusade culture from the Mamlūk reconquest of Acre (1291) to the Ottoman siege of Constantinople (1453) drawing on Middle English romances and their contexts in various literary, historical, and legal documents (in English, French, Occitan, German, and Latin). The political culture to which post-1291 crusade romances belonged, I argue, was ambivalent, self-critical, and riddled with anxieties. These anxieties were about issues as fundamental and diverse as God’s endorsement of the crusading enterprise, the conversion of crusaders to Islam, sinfulness and divisions within the Christian community, and the morality of violence. After situating the book’s key claims within debates on Edward Said’s Orientalism and crusade literature, I present its methodology: engaged historicism, attention to how romance writers adapted their sources, and analysis of emotional rhetoric. The book’s contributions to the history of emotions and Middle English studies are discussed, as are the new insights it provides into the historical dimensions of the genre of romance.

While many terms are used interchangeably, ‘recycling’, ‘spolia’, ‘reuse’, and ‘reprocessing’ have distinct definitions and histories. This introduction situates previous studies in the areas of ancient recycling and reuse and provides a summary of thirty-eight villa case study sites with archaeological evidence for material salvage and recycling.

This chapter sets the scene for a reorientation of thinking about the scope of Byzantium and Byzantine Studies for a new generation of scholarship. It charts the changes in the field since the seminal *East of Byzantium* volume of 1982 and argues for the inclusion of the broader Christian East under the umbrella of Byzantine Studies. To what degree is “East Rome” too limiting a concept for the vibrant fields of Eastern Christian Studies that find themselves often adjacent to Byzantium in modern scholarship? At the same time, real connections and disconnections must be explored across political and imperial lines, and the value of Global History is assessed as a tool for understanding the field holistically. The Byzantine Near East is a burgeoning field that brings many new questions and a host of literary, artistic, and material evidence to bear on what “Byzantium” meant in the early Middle Ages.

The introduction argues that the current understanding of late antique style as abstract and spiritual is not supported by the evidence. It surveys the trajectory of this idea in the literature of late antique art and proposes an alternative approach based on concepts of style outlined in late antique rhetorical theory.