About the Element series:

This series aims to render the vibrant world of the eastern Roman empire more accessible to a broad academic audience of students, teachers and researchers than traditional specialized scholarship typically allows. It highlights research that reflects new thinking about the conceptualization of eastern Roman culture and society within broader schemas of pre-modern history and cultural study, and so challenges established understandings of the field of “Byzantine Studies” and the traditional (and problematic) rubrics of “Byzantium” and “Byzantine.”  The series further queries the boundaries of the discipline by exploring communities often relegated to the interstices between more established fields of study and by interrogating connections between cultural products, religion, and political communities. In this way, it fosters a dynamic conversation on the future of the field without imposing a uniform framework or approach. Individual contributions encompass the visual and literary cultures, history, and religion in the cultural sphere of the Roman empire, broadly conceived, from the fourth to fifteenth centuries CE.

Series Editors:

Leonora Neville is the John and Jeanne Rowe Professor of Byzantine History and Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has written extensively on eastern Roman society, particularly on authority in provincial communities, history writing, gender, and the importance of the classical past for medieval Roman culture.

Darlene L. Brooks Hedstrom is the Myra and Robert Kraft and Jacob Hiatt Chair in Christian Studies at Brandeis University. She is an archaeologist and historian of the late antique Mediterranean world. Her works examine the intersection of objects, religious practice, monasticism, and the history of archaeology.