Giovanni Roberto Ruffini . Social Networks in Byzantine Egypt. New York : Cambridge University Press . 2008 . Pp. x, 278. $110.00.

Abstract

Historians of ancient and early medieval social and economic history are dogged by one basic problem: due to the partial or fragmentary nature of the evidence, they lack hard statistical data on which to base their models or conclusions. In recent years, scholars have tended to adopt two solutions to help redress this problem. The first is to approach ancient and early medieval economy and society from the perspective of comparative history, a technique that has borne remarkable fruit in the form of Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell's The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (2000) and Jairus Banaji's Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity: Gold, Labour, and Aristocratic Dominance (2001). The other solution has been to adopt wholesale models or techniques derived from the social sciences and apply these to antiquity—a methodology that will long be associated with the name of the late Keith Hopkins. Each of these approaches has its critics, but it is by the results and insights they furnish that they either stand or fall.