This Element will reevaluate the relationship between monasticism and the city in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages in the period 400 to 700 in both post-Roman West and the eastern Mediterranean, putting both of those areas in conversation. Building on recent scholarship on the nature of late antique urbanism, the authors can observe that the links between late antique Christian thought and the late and post-Roman urban space were far more relevant to the everyday practice of monasticism than previously thought. By comparing Latin, Greek and Syriac sources from a broad geographical area, the authors gain a birds' eye view on the enduring importance of urbanism in a late and post-Roman monastic world.

No abstract

No abstract

This article examines the main directions of contact of the Anglo-Saxon world and the question of English ports, the emporia. Together they form the basis of early Anglo-Saxon interpretation of the British Isles pattern of contact. The question of emporia (but not necessarily the emporia themselves as it will be discussed in the last section) is important here, because as entities they formed the gates of trade system of the Anglo-Saxon England in the given period. As such they were also the windows to the world and helped in establishing new contacts and maintaining the old ones.

Early Medieval Britain was more Roman than we think. The Roman Empire left vast infrastructural resources on the island. These resources lay buried not only in dirt and soil, but also in texts, laws, chronicles, charters, even churches and landscapes. This book uncovers them and shows how they shaped Early Medieval Britain. Infrastructures, material and symbolic, can work in ways that are not immediately obvious and exert an influence long after their creators have gone. Infrastructure can also rest dormant and be reactivated with a changed function, role and appearance. This is not a simple story of continuity and discontinuity: It is a story of adaptation and transformation, of how the Roman infrastructural past was used and re-used, and also how it influenced the later societies of Britain.