It is possible that not every former Byzantinist will want to identify as a scholar of east Rome. I am not referring here to unreconstructed denialists, but to historians who have a legitimate concern that the Roman paradigm does not capture the nature of their material (though it is likely that denialists will hide under that cover for a while). Specifically, this might include certain aspects of Orthodox history and identity and also of Greek philology (literature, paleography, and the like). We can imagine certain monks, for example, who gave up worldly things and traveled along international networks of Orthodox monasticism, paying little attention to the distinction between Roman and non-Roman. Let us assume that they could transcend their Roman ethnicity, even though others would still have continued to classify them by it. Still, many of them produced works of religious devotion and theology in which the word “Roman” never appears and the political and social context of their writing is invisible (which crucially, however, does not mean that it did not exist). Similar reservations might be expressed on behalf of people who had other concerns—local ones, or those relating to gender or occupation—that were not overtly related to issues foregrounded here. Why should they be placed under a Roman rubric, when a concern for such things was not foremost on their minds?

To a certain extent, this question misunderstands how field-names work in identifying and organizing research. These names do not represent mentalities on a granular level, but cluster research into broad consortia. The same questions can, after all, be raised about the name of any field of historical research. Take ancient Greek studies, for example. Greek identity, or indeed any issue theorized overtly as “Greek,” was only one interest among many for the people who are studied by that field, and a fairly abstract one at that. Field-names do not claim to represent what people were most concerned with on the ground. Rather, they operate at a high level of abstraction because their aim is to group research into thematic bundles and distinguish them from their peers, which are similarly bundled. It makes sense, then, for these bundles to be identified by a top-tier abstraction. It is possible, for example, that most people engaged in ancient religious rituals did not imagine, in so doing, that they were engaged in specifically Greek rituals (though some perhaps did).