Ravenna in Late Antiquity

Deborah Mauskopf Deliyannis's Ravenna in Late Antiquity is a major scholarly study of the city's transformation into a key center of late Roman, Ostrogothic and Byzantine political and religious authority, examining its famous mosaic churches within their full historical and liturgical context rather than only as art objects. Deliyannis's authority rests on close combined use of archaeological, art-historical and textual sources, and the book is widely regarded as the standard modern academic history of the city for this period. As a comprehensive single-volume history spanning several centuries and multiple ruling powers, it synthesizes considerable existing specialist scholarship on individual monuments and reigns, with its own extensive bibliography pointing toward deeper single-monument studies where finer art-historical questions arise.