Mediterranean Islands in Late Antiquity: A Cultural and Environmental History, c. 300–600 CE

Mediterranean Islands in Late Antiquity: A Cultural and Environmental History, c. 300–600 CE

Kotva, Alyssa

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2025, History

Although they sit at the very center of the late antique world, Mediterranean islands have tended to be part of the scenery more often than they have been major participants in the historiography of Late Antiquity. This dissertation demonstrates that, as material economic zones and as conceptually potent spaces, islands were in fact central to the political and cultural developments that shaped the Mediterranean region between ca. 300 and 600 CE. Late Roman administrative structures, the development of Christian ecclesiastical networks, and the uneven fragmentation of Mediterranean economic systems connected islands and islanders to centers of power. Moreover, it argues that the idea that islands are both ‘other' and ‘universal' spaces with marvelous and transformative connotations and that they form a coherent geographic category, developed in large part during Late Antiquity, and emerged through the textual and educational techniques of knowledge production. This idea was only intensified rather than diminished as Christian thinkers adopted and responded to earlier traditions. Both these material and cultural features of late antique islands, finally, were animated by ancient and late ancient epistemology and phenomenology. Drawing on a wide range of literary, documentary, material and scientific sources, this dissertation reveals how biology, geology, culture, and trade compounded and connected on late antique islands.

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Committee: Kristina Sessa (Advisor); Paolo Squatriti (Committee Member); Christopher Otter (Committee Member); David Brakke (Committee Member)