Leslie Brubaker is Professor Emerita of Byzantine art and Director of the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham. She has published widely on Byzantine culture, with particular emphasis on manuscripts, iconoclasm, and gender. Her most recent projects have focussed on the cult of the Virgin in Byzantium, processions, and the Byzantine peasantry. Rebecca Darley is Lecturer in Global History, 500–1500 CE, at the University of Leeds. Her research focusses on Byzantine cultural history, especially perceptions of the foreign and on political and economic changes in the Western Indian Ocean in the first millennium CE, as well as all things numismatic. Daniel Reynolds is Senior Lecturer in Byzantine History at the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham and co-director the Crossroads of Empires Project in Montecorvino Rovella, Italy. He completed his PhD at the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies University of Birmingham and held a British Academy postdoctoral fellowship from 2014 to 2017.
‘This collection of expert papers [is] a worthy effort to put Byzantium back on the world stage, showing how it played a highly significant role in terms of connectivity well beyond the margins of the Mediterranean … the book overall stands as an important contribution to future directions in which Byzantine studies might usefully develop’ - Medieval Archaeology, 67/2, 2023.