The dynamics of faith and community area is a topic of perennial interest for all societies around the Mediterranean. Frequently, as the editors of this volume, which originated as a conference held in 2016 in Bucharest and Iasi, Romania, emphasize, the frictions that periodically threaten and even rip apart these communities are laid at the foot of the three monotheistic traditions that emerged within that world and continue to influence it: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (11). However, as the editors also highlight, once considered with nuance and attention to the detail of historic context, this religious diversity and the identities it helped form often provided the glue that held communities together. This has been so since late Antiquity, the focus of this volume, when these salvation religions became simultaneously “a source of peace and regulation and a source of turmoil and conflict” (12). Taking the wide-angle yet deeply granular approach to faith and community exquisitely exemplified by the work of the honorand, Peter R. L. Brown, the contributors discuss Christianity's capacity to refashion existing social structures into something new (Rapp on “brother-making,” Zugravu, Sheridan); the enduring strangeness of early Christianity and the centrality of the “periphery” (Michelson, Caldwell, and especially Townsend on Mani); the literary style of Christian ascetic works and the impact of Roman law (Kalish, Guran). Tannous probes how the phrase “there is no god but God” changed with the spread of Islam beyond the Arabian Peninsula, while Simonsohn focuses on Jewish, Christian, and Muslim attitudes to kinship and the family across religious lines to show the diversity of the medieval Mediterranean world. This diversity is also at the heart of Carlson's contribution on the notion of faith, particularity among members of the Church of the East, and of Mavroudi's careful examination of medieval Byzantine–Arabic intellectual exchanges, often downplayed in modern scholarship still wedded to the idea of a stagnant Byzantium. Byzantium remains the focus of the final two papers. Shlenov examines the afterlife of the seeming paradox of the emperor's abasement with its late antique antecedents, and Milliner the longue durée of the iconography of the suffering virgin well past Byzantium's demise. The first and last contribution belong to Peter Brown. His original closing address now opens the volume, highlighting the impact of Romanian scholars on his work. The volume closes with a 2006 interview Petre Guran conducted with Brown at Princeton. Faith and community around the Mediterranean, as this volume attests, are themes of international relevance that concern us all and demand the pointilliste attention so well exemplified by Peter Brown and all those gathered here to honor him.
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