A New Profile of Medieval—and Byzantine!—Rome

The principal aim of my fellowship was to make headway on my current book, which seeks to complement and update Richard Krautheimer’s classic Rome: Profile of a City, 312–1308. I made good progress on the section dealing with the two centuries, mid-sixth to mid-eighth, when Rome was under Byzantine rule. I also wrote several articles/book chapters dealing with aspects of urbanism and topography in later medieval Rome, which have helped shape my thinking about that period in the city’s history and paved the way for later sections of the book. The spring semester witnessed an especially fortunate confluence at Dumbarton Oaks of scholars in urban history, topography, and archaeology, among them Paul Magdalino, Anna Leone, and Nicholas Beaudry. Much informal discussion and a lunchtime roundtable discussion ensued, which inspired me to conceive what will probably become two articles on the potential of nonarchaeological approaches for the study of medieval urbanism. I was also fortunate to be invited to speak at this year’s Garden and Landscape Studies symposium on “Landscapes of Pre-Modern Cities.”