The papers in this volume are contributed by leading historians, art historians and archaeologists and focus on 5 key themes: the evolution of settlement patterns in the Byzantine empire; the impact of barbarian elites in Spain, Gaul, Italy and Pannonia; the role of the Church in the definition of new links between town and territories; the situation in culturally homogenous territories such as Constantinople and the minor Langbard polities; the situation in economically defined territories. Contributions include papers by Gian Pietro Brogiolo, Pablo C. Díaz, Michel Fixot, Gisela Ripoll and Javier Arce, Sauro Gelichi, Wolfram Brandes and John Haldon, Nancy Gauthier, Gisella Cantino Wataghin, Ross Balzaretti, Martina Caroli, Neil Christie, Bryan Ward-Perkins and John Mitchell.

Beginning in 1981, Richard Hodges supervised the excavation of the Benedictine monastery of San Vincenzo al Volturno, one of the great centers of Dark Age Europe, situated in spectacular mountain country in central Italy. The existence of the monastery had long been known from a twelfth-century illuminated manuscript and the excavations threw vivid light on its epic history. This richly illustrated book tells of the discoveries made by Hodges's team, with the Samnite and Roman origins of the site charted in detail, and the magnificence of the monastery's early medieval period fully elaborated. Built around a modest eighth-century monastery, the ninth-century monastic city was grandiose, remarkable for its architecture and the wealth of its artistic culture. Hodges documents the excavations of the great ninth-century abbey church of San Vincenzo Maggiore, part of the cloisters, the distinguished guests? palace, the workshops, cemeteries, and many smaller buildings. San Vincenzo, with its rich decor and opulent material culture, is revealed as a model Carolingian monastery, a unique monument to the Carolingian Renaissance in Europe. Light in the Dark Ages traces the history of San Vincenzo from the monastery's spectacular rise as a result of Charlemagne's patronage to its cataclysmic sack by Arab marauders in 881, demonstrating the relation between the treasures unearthed and their political context.

Using the great south-Italian monastery of San Vincenzo al Volturno, one of the best preserved monasteries of the earliest Middle Ages, as a case-study and heuristic paradigm, John Mitchell has engaged in a wide-ranging examination of the ways in which visual culture was developed and deployed by ambitious states and institutions in early medieval Europe. The present volume includes studies on the cultural dynamics of Italy and its contribution to the visual complexion of Europe in the period, as well as essays on many aspects of the artistic culture of San Vincenzo, including a series of papers on the display of script in the physical fabric of the monastery and the prominent role it played in its self-image.

A exploration of Paschal I's building campaign that illuminates the relationship between the material world and political power in medieval Rome.

This collection explores multiple artefactual, visual, textual and conceptual adaptations, developments and exchanges across the medieval world in the context of their contemporary and subsequent re-appropriations.

Memory is a subject that recently has attracted many scholars and readers not only in the general historical sciences, but also in the special field of art history. However, in this book, in which more than 130 papers given at the XXIXth International Congress of the History of Art (Amsterdam) 1996 have been compiled, Memory is also juxtaposed to its counterpart, Oblivion, thus generating extra excitement in the exchange of ideas. The papers are presented in eleven sections, each of which is devoted to a different aspect of memory and oblivion, ranging from purely material aspects of preservation, to social phenomena with regard to art collecting, from the memory of the art historian to workshop practices, from art in antiquity, to the newest media, from Buddhist iconography to the Berlin Wall. The book addresses readers in the field of history, history of art and psychology.