Leslie Brubaker is Reader in Byzantine Art History at the Centre for Byzantine Studies and Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity in the University of Birmingham. Her many publications on Byzantine culture include Vision and Meaning in Ninth-Century Byzantium (Cambridge, 1999) and Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era: The Sources (2001). Julia M. H. Smith is Reader in Mediaeval History at the University of St Andrews. She has published extensively on early medieval history and her books include Province and Empire: Brittany and the Carolingians (Cambridge, 1992) and EARLY Medieval Rome and the Christian West (editor, 2000).

• 1. Introduction Julia M. H. Smith; Part I. Gender in Late antique, Byzantine and Islamic Societies: 2. Gender and ethnicity in the early middle ages Walter Pohl; 3. Clothes maketh the man: power dressing and elite masculinity in the later roman world Mary Harlow; 4. Social transformation, gender transformation: the court eunuch, 300–900 Shaun Tougher; 5. Sex, lies and textuality: the secret history of Prokopios and the rhetoric of gender in sixth-century Byzantium Leslie Brubaker; 6. Romance and reality in the Byzantine brideshows Martha Vinson; 7. Men, women and slaves in Abbasid society Julia Bray; 8. Gender and politics in the harem of al-Muqtadir Nadia Maria El Cheikh; Part II. Gender in Germanic Studies: 9. Dressing conservatively: women's brooches as markers of ethnic identity? Bonnie Effros; 10. Gendering courts in the early medieval west Janet L. Nelson; 11. Men, women and liturgical practice in the early medieval west Gisela Muschiol; 12. Gender and the patronage of culture in Merovingian Gaul Yitzhak Hen; 13. Genealogy defined by women: the case of the Pippinids Ian Wood; 14. Brideshows revisited: praise, slander and exegesis in the reign of the Empress Judith Mayke de Jong; 15. 'What is the word if not semen?' Priestly bodies in Carolingian exegesis Lynda Coon; 16. Negotiating gender, family and status in Anglo-Saxon burial practices, c.600–950 Dawn Hadley; Index.

'… a model of careful selection and coherence; very few article collections are so well integrated and balanced.' Alexandra Cuffel, Macalester College