Ronchey, S. and Raimondo Tocci, eds. Peter Schreiner. Byzantinische Kultur. Eine Aufsatzsammlung. IV. Die Ausstrahlung Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2013.

The essential methodological inspiration unifying the essays of this fourth, indispensable volume of Byzantinische Kultur by Peter Schreiner, edited by S. Ronchey and R. Tocci, is a reading of those marginalia in the history of Byzantium that are the hybridisations and exchanges with other ethne — be they mixed-blood matrimonial alliances within the Constantinopolitan imperial family or cultural colonisations via linguistic grafts such as those of the Slavic societies, mirror games between state and religious ideologies, as in the case of the papacy and the Frankish monarchy, fluxes and refluxes of influences, convergences and collisions between obliterated or vanquished difference and diffidence, as in the case of the Italian mercantile republics and their eastern colonies: borderline incidents at the interface between worlds, information inscribed on the margins of central imperial events, as enlightening as manuscript scholia are on the margins of the mirror writing of the primary narration.