Covering late antique Egypt into the period of Arab rule, this chapter introduces documents and literary texts translated from Greek, Coptic, and Arabic. In the countryside, coloni joined slaves and dependents at work on the great estates of Byzantine Egypt, while in the cities slavery continued as before. Coptic literature from the same period introduces servitude within Christian monasteries. The writings of Shenoute and Gnostic texts regularly employ the vocabulary of slavery in a negative sense. The trade, employment, and emancipation of slaves continued. Conscripted labour is also documented. Children and adults donated to monasteries represent a new form of sacred servitude. With the Arab conquest of Egypt, war and raiding resurface as important sources of slaves. Nubia and the Near East were again key areas for their acquisition, and slaves are illustrated as active in most areas of life and integrated into the religious life of their owners’ households.

The Regularis Concordia was probably written by Æthelwold of Winchester as part of the reform of Benedictine monasteries in England in the late tenth century. It is based on the Rule of St. Benedict and gives guidelines for the monastic lives of monks and nuns. It contains an early example of theatre ritual or drama. An eleventh-century manuscript of the work Cotton Tiberius A. iii contains interlinear glosses in Old English. Here the official preface tells of king Edgar’s role in the Benedictine reform.

Bede in his letter to Bishop Ecgberht of York expresses his worries over the greed and lack of Latin learning among the clergy, and over lay control in certain monasteries. He stresses the need for the basic texts of the Christian faith to be translated into English. Here he shows that it was not the case that all the clergy were competent in Latin.

A number of individual manuscripts which show unique or singular arrangements of ordines romani are discussed, located to Worms under Bishop Bernharius, and the instigation of a circle of bishops around Arn of Salzburg, who shared ordines with each other and with monasteries under their patronage. The chapter discusses the relation of these texts to pilgrim travel literature, from clergy who had been to Rome and observed and questioned the Roman clergy.

This chapter discusses a group of manuscripts which carry some of the oldest examples of the ordines romani. The texts are together termed the ‘Roman’ Collection, and it was assumed they were put together from the texts of purest Roman origin to propogate the adoption of Roman liturgy in Francia. However, examination of the manuscripts reveals a much less focused or immediate gathering of the texts, and shows that none of the given texts are indisputably Roman in origin. Individual manuscripts also continually changed how the Collection was presented and conceived, adding more individual texts of Frankish conception to it. The Collection is traced back to Carolingian Metz, where an experiment in the creative adoption of Roman liturgy was being undertaken.

Monastic communities needed wine for individual consumption, as well as for liturgical purposes and payments in kind. Next to grain, wine was the most common commodity transported from different villages to monasteries, as we learn from invoices from Bawit, Wadi Sarga, and Edfu. It is therefore widely assumed that monasteries, especially the more affluent ones, owned vineyards. Following a brief overview of the purposes wine served in monasteries, this chapter presents and reassesses the evidence for monastic vineyard ownership and considers other options available to monks seeking to procure wine for their needs.

The St Michael Collection (dating from 823 to 914) from the Fayum Oasis is the earliest extant group of painted Coptic manuscripts and is impressive because it has remained together as a cohesive whole. The manuscripts reveal aspects of monastic book production ranging from acquisition of materials to the practices of scribes and painters, as well as aspects of book culture, from the dedication of books to sharing them across a regional network of monasteries. The study of this unique collection allows the cost of these manuscripts to be estimated, using inferences about the materials, time, and effort required to produce them. The results of this analysis enhance our understanding of the relationships among patrons, books, monasteries, and scribes in the ninth and tenth centuries in the Fayum Oasis. Ultimately, this chapter argues that, within the context of the Egyptian monastic economy, the production of these books was not expensive. Yet, the cost of books in the medieval period was still perceived to be high.

This chapter explores aspects of the transformation of the spatial and built environment of monasteries in the Southern Levant, with a focus on Arabia and Palaestina. Literary sources and archaeological excavations provide tangible evidence of the development of monasteries into productive units in the context of a larger rural economy. The success of the management model and its integration into the social and economic fabric are testified by the growing number of minor monastic structures equipped with wine and olive oil production units, cisterns, and terraced fields. The rise of monasticism reflects the importance of the Church in daily life, the agency and jurisdiction of local bishops – as evidenced by the mosaic inscriptions – and mutual contacts with adjacent villages. Papyri and other written sources combine to produce a picture of a well-structured economy aimed at intensive production, especially in the sixth and seventh centuries, even in the wake of critical conditions such as pandemics, climatic downturns, and political changes.

The formulas show us property transactions among laypeople that are fundamentally similar to those between laypeople and ecclesiastical institutions that we see in the extant charters. Laypeople sold or gave property to each other, or exchanged it with each other, and they used documents to do it. However, the formulas broaden our view of the sorts of transactions laypeople engaged in and who engaged in them. For example, different kinds of property changed hands: not simply arable but also vineyards, plots of land within cities, and even townhouses. People used property as security for loans. Laypeople also arranged to hold property as benefices, or as so-called precarial grants, not only from churches/monasteries or kings but also from each other. One person used a benefice arrangement with a king to pass property to a chosen heir, in much the same way as others did with monasteries. The evidence in the formulas for these sorts of arrangements suggests that the property arrangements between lay families and ecclesiastical institutions or kings that dominate the charter record reflect only part of a larger culture, in which a variety of people in the Carolingian world used property to create and maintain ties with each other.

This chapter addresses the question of why prominent nobles were so interested in being church advocates by examining the legitimate financial benefits that came with the position. Using sources from the period 1050 to 1250, it argues that advocates typically received one-third of the fines when they held court on ecclesiastical estates, and also received food and lodging in return for fulfilling their role as judge. It also demonstrates that many advocates received separate income for their responsibilities in providing protection. While all of these payments were initially in kind, by the thirteenth century it was increasingly common for advocates to receive a single lump-sum money payment for fulfilling all their advocatial responsibilities, which is evidence of the increasing commodification of local positions of authority in this period. This chapter also investigates the numismatic evidence for church advocates as additional source material for the economic dimensions of the role.

This chapter argues that, especially in the East Frankish Kingdom, Carolingian advocates were operating as key local agents for churches on their estates by the mid-ninth century at the latest. While the sources from the West Frankish and Italian parts of the Carolingian empire suggest different trends, the East Frankish sources (especially royal grants of immunity) demonstrate that advocates acquired important policing powers and judicial authority on ecclesiastical properties during this period. This undermines the typical scholarly argument that Carolingian advocates were a different phenomenon than subsequent types of advocates, as these East Frankish advocates already had responsibilities that most later advocates would continue to have into the eighteenth century.

This chapter focuses on the period between roughly 1050 and 1150, when calls to reform the Church and religious life swept across Europe. The new religious orders that emerged in this period, including the Cistercians, Premonstratensians and Augustinian canons, all sought to limit the influence of secular authorities over their communities. Nevertheless, this chapter argues that – especially in the German-speaking lands – church advocacy was already too entrenched a feature of society for these new orders to ignore it or effectively control it. Someone needed to provide protection and exercise justice over the numerous estates these new foundations were receiving, and nobles had already come to rely on the position of advocate as an effective means of asserting their influence over monasteries and churches. As a result, while Church reformers increasingly sought in this period to regulate and place limits on advocates’ responsibilities, they were unable to prevent high-ranking nobles from accumulating large numbers of church advocacies in their own hands.

Chapter 9, “Residential Constantinople,” considers Constantinopolitan domestic architecture by examining written sources and material remains. It discusses the evidence chronologically and according to social group, distinguishing between the early Byzantine period and the middle and late Byzantine periods to demonstrate that, institutional continuity notwithstanding, the makeup of the residential city and its components changed over time.

The similarities in the way that the ubiquitous cult of saints was expressed in Wales, Cornwall and Brittany form a major body of evidence for contact among these regions. Overtly ecclesiastical place-names, containing such elements as *lann, are unusually common in all three regions. The implications of these for similarities and differences in church-organisation are discussed. The significance of the appearance of the same personal names compounded in ecclesiastical place-names in different British-speaking regions is explored. These seem likely in most cases to reflect movements of the devotees of particular saints between Wales, Cornwall and Brittany from the sixth to the ninth centuries and particularly the reliance of Bretons on the educational and spiritual resources of important Welsh churches. Contact between Brittany and Cornwall was more sustained and more intimate: a tenth-century list reveals a number of Breton saints established at permanent cult-sites in Cornwall by the tenth century and more were to follow by the central Middle Ages; Cornish and Breton authors also drew on each other’s work in composing saints’ Lives throughout the medieval period. By contrast the relative rarity of Irish saints’ cults in Brittany and the absence of Breton saints from Ireland implies a more distant relationship.

This chapter is mainly concerned with the political ideology, norms and behaviour associated with the Byzantine monarchy. It focuses on how the ceremonial and hierarchies of power played out in Constantinople, assessing contemporary expectations of the role and conduct of the emperor. Such expectations were often revealed most clearly in time of instability, as contemporary accounts of coups indicate. The chapter outlines the ceremonial life of the court and discusses the sacred and secular topography of Constantinople as the stage for the continuous display of elite power. The visual and non-verbal qualities to Byzantine ceremonial culture are stressed, as is the centrality of law to imperial authority, political office and spatial organisation. The principal imperial hierarchies of power (military, civil and clerical) and the relationship of the emperor and patriarch are explored, with women and eunuchs seen as integral to the workings of official hierarchies. Alternative concepts of power began to emerge in the later period, when the empire’s territorial integrity was eroding, yet the long-term resilience of traditional ideology, ceremonies and hierarchies is noteworthy.

Early medieval Italy was the most densely urbanized part of western Eurasia until the eleventh century. This chapter examines the practices of urbanism in the Italian peninsula, considering the social and political implications of living in cities and how they shaped the ways of life and patterns of governance in Latin- and Greek-speaking areas of the Italian peninsula. Special consideration is paid to how the Carolingian conquest and Frankish control of parts of Italy might have challenged the roles played by cities in economic and political life in those areas. Urbanism and investment in cities were tools for Carolingian rulers of Italy and their contemporaries.

A few monasteries cannot easily be categorized because so little is known about them from fleeting references in documents. This brief chapter considers the limited evidence for these monasteries and evaluates what can be said about their likely affiliation and their place in the framework of Crusader States society.

The focus of this chapter is on Orthodox monasteries as spiritual centres. The nature of Orthodox monastic spirituality in the Holy Land is examined from hagiographical and theological writing. The theme of the chapter is the continuity of early monastic traditions and the adherence of the monasteries to ideals and practices that had their roots in the early Christian ‘golden age’ of monasticism.