Across 18 individually authored chapters, this volume offers fresh insight into how Italy was crucial to the East Roman world across the early and cenral Middle Ages. An interdiscplinary approach, incorporating historiography, archaeology, social, political, and economic history, this study provides a vast array of perspectives on the themes of empire, cities, and elites. With contributions from established and early career scholars, elucidating particular issues of scholarship as well as general historical developments, the volume provides both immediate contributions and opens space for a new generation of readers and scholars to a growing field.

Across 18 individually authored chapters, this volume offers fresh insight into how Italy was crucial to the East Roman world across the early and cenral Middle Ages. An interdiscplinary approach, incorporating historiography, archaeology, social, political, and economic history, this study provides a vast array of perspectives on the themes of empire, cities, and elites. With contributions from established and early career scholars, elucidating particular issues of scholarship as well as general historical developments, the volume provides both immediate contributions and opens space for a new generation of readers and scholars to a growing field.

This volume represents a selection of papers presented at the 2013 Edinburgh Seventh Century Colloquium, showcasing the latest scholarship from a rising generation of academics. The volume traverses the globe from Iran to the Atlantic and from Sweden to the Sahara and ranges from the establishment of the early Islamic state to the beginnings of English Christianity. Topics include the transmission of high culture across time, settlement patterns in a rapidly changing world and the formation of new and emerging identities. The essays also bring into dialogue a wide range of disciplinary and methodological perspectives, including archaeology, literature, history, art, papyrology and economics. Together, they generate valuable new insights into the still uncharted territories of the long seventh century.