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.

In these informed and entertaining essays, Juliet McMaster's recurring concern is with the interpenetration of intelligence with emotion among Jane Austen's characters. The author, a leading Jane Austen scholar, begins with an exploration of Austen's burgeoning popularity in our culture, though close studies of lesser-well known works such as 'Love and Friendship' and 'The Watsons', and familiar texts such as 'Pride and Prejudice' and 'Emma', moving on to a wide-ranging exploration through all the novels, of the operation of love and the articulation of desire.

McMaster's lively study looks at the various codes by which eighteenth-century novelists made the minds of their characters legible through their bodies. She tellingly explores the discourses of medicine, physiognomy, gesture and facial expression, completely familiar to contemporary readers but not to us, in ways that enrich our reading of such classics as "Clarissa" and "Tristram Shandy," as well as of novels by Fanny Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen.

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.

McMaster's lively study looks at the various codes by which Eighteenth-century novelists made the minds of their characters legible through their bodies. She tellingly explores the discourses of medicine, physiognomy, gesture and facial expression, completely familiar to contemporary readers but not to us, in ways that enrich our reading of such classics as Clarissa and Tristram Shandy , as well as of novels by Fanny Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen.