This paper discusses the issue of the Emperor Herakleios’ mid career adoption of a large handlebar mustache at the end of the seventh century Byzantine-Persian war.

In this paper I outline a historical materialist framework for the transhistorical critique of ethnicity, providing a case study in the shaape of Armenian settlements in medieval New Rome. This is necessary since constructivism – the dominant theoretical tradition of the last forty years or so – has failed to dethrone common sense, met…[Read more]

An analysis of Ioannes Zonaras’ history, in particular its preface, in the light of recent debates over East Roman identity and republicanness, drawing a broad set of comparanda from the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

A social-historical reading of historical causation in Khoniates’ Khronike Diegesis, with particular reference to the information he provides on Asia Minor.

Review of the collected volume Court Ceremonies and Rituals of Power in Byzantium and the Eastern Mediterranean.

From Constantinople to the Frontier: The City and the Cities provides twenty-five articles addressing the concept of centres and peripheries in the late antique and Byzantine worlds, focusing specifically on urban aspects of this paradigm. Spanning from the fourth to thirteenth centuries, and ranging from the later Roman empires to the early…[Read more]

Introduction to special journal edition of Medieval Worlds, focused on revisiting and reframing the debate over ethnicity and nationhood before modernity.

Dedicatory inscriptions on Middle Byzantine reliquaries have been analyzed for their documentary information, including prosopography, provenance, and date. Relying solely on this data limits our understanding of these objects. The methodology in this paper recontextualizes Byzantine reliquaries and their dedicatory inscriptions by reassessing the…[Read more]

Dedicatory inscriptions on Middle Byzantine reliquaries convey important information, including the identity of the patrons, the provenance of the relics, and the purpose of the gift. I argue that the placement of the dedicatory inscription in relationship to the image and the contents of the reliquary provides a more nuanced message than that…[Read more]