Armenia and Byzantium shared a long history of political and cultural interaction. The articles in this volume offer a fresh look, often based on new material, on aspects of dialogue, exchange, and confrontation in the areas of literature, material culture, and religion.

Byzantium is more and more recognized as a vibrant culture in dialogue with neighbouring regions, political entities, and peoples. Where better to look for this kind of dynamism than in the interactions between the Byzantines and the Armenians? Warfare and diplomacy are only one part of that story. The more enduring part consists of contact and mutual influence brokered by individuals who were conversant in both cultures and languages. The articles in this volume feature fresh work by younger and established scholars that illustrate the varieties of interaction in the fields of literature, material culture, and religion. Contributors are: Gert Boersema, Emilio Bonfiglio, Bernard Coulie, Karen Hamada, Robin Meyer, Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, Claudia Rapp, Mark Roosien, Werner Seibt, Emmanuel Van Elverdinghe, Theo Maarten van Lint, Alexandra-Kyriaki Wassiliou-Seibt, and David Zakarian.

The volume – whose chapters originated at panels at the International Byzantine Congress in Belgrade and at the IMC in Leeds – seeks to offer an introduction into various aspects of social and geographical mobility, and the intrinsic relationship between the two, as well as into the microstructures of social action in the Byzantine world during the high and late Middle Ages. Based on a balanced approach to the role of personal agency and social structure, the authors of the individual chapters seek to clarify how and why various kinds of people mobilized to either change place and/or social position, or to form groups whose actions shaped social reality both at the imperial centre and the provincial periphery.

In a searching challenge to the paradigm of medieval Christian dualism, this study reenvisions the Paulicians as largely conventional Christians engendered by complex socio-religious forces in the borderlands of Armenia and Asia Minor.

This volume commemorating the late Armenian scholar Karen Yuzbashyan comprises studies of mediaeval Armenian culture, including the reception of biblical and parabiblical texts, theological literature, liturgy, hagiography, manuscript studies, Church history and secular history, and Christian art and material culture. Special attention is paid to early Christian and late Jewish texts and traditions preserved in documents written in Armenian. Several contributions focus on the interactions of Armenia with other cultures both within and outside the Byzantine Commonwealth: Greek, Georgian, Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopic, and Iranian. Select contributions may serve as initial reference works for their respective topics (the catalogue of Armenian khachkars in the diaspora and the list of Armenian Catholicoi in Tzovk’).

The transition zone between Africa, Asia and Europe was the most important intersection of human mobility in the medieval period. The present volume for the first time systematically covers migration histories of the regions between the Mediterranean and Central Asia and between Eastern Europe and the Indian Ocean in the centuries from Late Antiquity up to the early modern era. Within this framework, specialists from Byzantine, Islamic, Medieval and African history provide detailed analyses of specific regions and groups of migrants, both elites and non-elites as well as voluntary and involuntary. Thereby, also current debates of migration studies are enriched with a new dimension of deep historical time. Contributors are: Alexander Beihammer, Lutz Berger, Florin Curta, Charalampos Gasparis, George Hatke, Dirk Hoerder, Johannes Koder, Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, Lucian Reinfandt, Youval Rotman, Yannis Stouraitis, Panayiotis Theodoropoulos, and Myriam Wissa.