This latest volume of Dumbarton Oaks Papers focuses in part on literary and historical texts: historicism in Byzantine thought and literature; the Chronicle of Matthew of Edessa, encompassing the First Crusade and the Armenian diaspora; and a reappraisal of the satirical prose work Mazaris’s Journey to Hades. The history and architecture of the Cypriot Monastery of Saint John Chrysostomos at Koutsovendis occupy a lengthy and informative chapter, which also includes a first edition of the “Letter of Nikon of the Black Mountain to the Founder George.” The volume also contains selected papers from the 2005 Dumbarton Oaks symposium on the archaeological evidence for settlement patterns in Anatolia and the Levant between 500 and 1000.
