Focusing on forms of interaction and methods of negotiation in multicultural, multi-ethnic and multilingual contexts during Antiquity and the Middle Ages, this volume examines questions of social and cultural interaction within and between diverse ethnic communities.

Christian Krötzl is Professor of Medieval History at the Tampere University, Finland. His research and publications have focused on everyday life, communication, parent-child relations, pilgrimages, miracles, missionary politics and student networks. He has edited, with Katariina Mustakallio, On Old Age. Approaching Death in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (2011), as well as De Amicitia. Friendship and Social Networks in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (2010).

Katariina Mustakallio is Senior Lecturer of History in the Department of History, Philosophy and Literary Studies at the Tampere University, Finland. She is also Adjunct Professor of Ancient History at the universities of Tampere and Turku. She has been Director of the Institutum Romanum Finlandiae in Rome (2009-13). Her research interests range from the early historiography of Rome to life course studies and from the lived religion to the material life and resilience in ancient port city of Rome, Ostia. For recent publications, see https://researchportal.tuni.fi/en/publications/

Miikka Tamminen is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Tampere University, Finland, where he obtained his PhD in 2013. His current research interests include the crusades, the crusade ideology and sermons, as well as the 'just war' tradition, and the monstrous races of the Middle Ages. His publications include Crusade Preaching and the Ideal Crusader (2018), and the co-edited book, with Christian Krötzl, Changing Minds. Communication and Influence in the High and Later Middle Ages (2013).

Difference and Essentialism: The Polemics of Physiognomy in the Later Roman Empire / Facing the Barbarian. Vessels in the Form of the Ethnic 'Other' in Roman Ostia, and Beyond / Cultural borrowing, appropriation, or forgery in a multicultural context - Ostian artefacts with an Egyptian touch / The Persecution of Illicit Talk in Thirteenth- and Early Fourteenth-Century Languedoc / The Negotiation and Display of Imperial and Provincial Identities in Cos: the Case of Gaius Stertinius Xenophon / Roman-Persian Wars in Roman Historiography, from Livy to Procopius: Expressions of Orientalism? / Names and identities of Greek elites with Roman citizenship / Neighbours and Strangers? Ostrogoths and Italians during the Gothic War / Jewish Inhabitants in Ancient Ostia / Differing Displays of Dacian Identity / From Byzantine Gentile to Florentine Jew: The Transformation of an Exemplar Conversion / 'At the end of the world and in the throats of our enemies' - Latin Europeans in Late Medieval Asia / Reflections on 'Neighbors or Strangers'