Fabio Guidetti and Katharina Meinecke's richly illustrated edited volume is part of a growing trend in late antique studies towards exploring visual cultures in globalised terms. The editors bring together contributors to interrogate why we see a proliferation of particular iconographies and motifs across geographic and cultural boundaries ‘[i]n a period characterised by increasing political fragmentation’ (1). The answer is not as simple as ‘acculturation to a dominating Roman culture and enhanced connectivity’ (1), they argue. Instead, an answer can only be uncovered through methodologies that take seriously the networks that fuel the interconnection of late antiquity's visual cultures. The geographical approach for which Guidetti and Meinecke advocate is informed by recent archaeological studies of globalisation in the ancient world broadly, and Matthew P. Canepa's research in particular.

The volume opens with an accessible introduction that makes the case for Late Antiquity's visual cultures as symptomatic of globalisation and acquaints readers with the periodisation of late antiquity, as well as the concepts of networks and globalisation foundational to the volume. Organised in four thematic sections, the fourteen chapters that follow explore late antique visual culture as a globalised phenomenon. The case studies they offer span Afro-Eurasia from roughly 300 to 800 c.e., though earlier material is also included. Importantly, the chapters cover regions traditionally overlooked by the field, such as South Arabia, Serbia and China.

Part I explores specific iconographic elements in the visual cultures of particular Roman provinces in the Iberian peninsula, North Africa and Sicily, Serbia, and Egypt between the late third through sixth centuries c.e. Each chapter examines how the interplay between the global and the local shapes image production in contexts traditionally regarded as peripheral. Particularly, the chapters in this section illustrate the enormous degree of agency that provincial artisans and patrons exercised over artistic production, on both a local and regional level. In her study of variations in sartorial imagery in mosaics found in North Africa and Sicily, for example, Amy Place establishes that, while the images have many similarities in the form of motifs that resonated with a broader elite culture, patrons’ clothing varied in ways that specifically communicated social prestige to their own local audiences. The contributions in this section thus add to recent scholarship that has moved away from interpreting artistic production in the provinces through a centre-periphery dichotomy in favour of emphasising the ‘polycentric character of late antique visual culture’ (118).

Part II offers four case studies: two that focus on particular iconographic motifs over an extended chronological period and two that focus on specific iconographic genres over a shorter period of time. Among the former, Renate Rosenthal-Heginbottom investigates the use of a single motif — the rider on horseback — across an array of mediums in one geographic region (the southern Levant), while Lindsay R. Morehouse explores depictions of a child with grapes in funerary monuments across a broad geographic region (Britain to Bahrain). Despite their differences, both studies show how attention to specific contexts of use can elucidate the polyvalent meanings of images employed across cultures and regions. Of the genre-related case studies, Guidetti's analysis of ivory diptychs, produced between 380 and 410 c.e., is particularly commendable. Through astute stylistic analysis, he illustrates the ways in which Roman artisans adopted some stylistic features of Theodosian court art, while also maintaining continuity with local traditions of portraiture. In doing so, Guidetti contributes to long-standing discussions of classicism in the fourth century c.e. and illustrates the possibilities of using a geographic approach for identifying regional styles when objects have secure provenance.

Part III tackles contexts ‘located on the edge of the Roman world, either geographically or chronologically’ (20)—post-Roman Gaul, South Arabia during the later Himyarite period and eighth-century Jerusalem—exploring how these environments engaged with and shaped Late Antiquity's visual koiné. In her study of the influence of foreign iconographies on late antique south Arabian stone reliefs and building decoration, Sarah Japp, for example, argues that the Himyarite ruling class employed and transformed Greco-Roman, Byzantine, Axumite and Persian elements in their visual culture to reflect their new socio-political reality. For the volume's readers, her understandable difficulty in determining particular motifs’ cultural origins might raise larger methodological questions about whether descriptors, such as ‘Byzantine’, are helpful for answering questions of globalisation, given that Late Antiquity's many visual cultures were indelibly enmeshed; the divisions between categories such as ‘Byzantine’ and ‘Axumite’, for example, are not easily drawn, and, as several of the volume's case studies illustrate, even single regions often lacked a unified style.

The strongest of the volume's sections, Part IV, interrogates how objects, images and ideas moved across late antique contexts, particularly those separated by far geographic distances. Meinecke's chapter, for example, develops a two-step model for the appropriation of iconography between regions and cultures in the fourth through eighth centuries c.e., through analysis of motifs, such as the dancing Maenad and ‘medallion style’ textiles. At the crux of the argument are the ways in which portable objects made accessible patterns and motifs to new contexts, with decontextualised motifs often functioning to evoke a broader visual vocabulary of elitism. The volume ends on a high note with Johannes Preiser-Kapeller's chapter. He uses network theory to trace how different scales of exchange facilitated long-distance trade networks. Particularly impressive is Preiser-Kapeller's mapping of regional clusters, which visualises the frequency and scales of exchange between particular sites and regions, illustrating the importance of local interactions in sustaining trade.

Despite the volume's merits, it is disappointing that there is no substantive engagement of the extensive scholarship on pattern books. Several of the chapters uncritically offer pattern books as an explanation for the appearance of particular images over far geographical distances. There is a lack of surviving model books, and the surviving pattern sheets are not prescriptive, but allow for artistic ingenuity. Given the volume's focus on the transfer of images, it is surprising that these evidentiary issues are not more thoughtfully considered.

Nevertheless, the volume is particularly helpful in setting out some possible paths for identifying and reconciling the global and the local when analysing Late Antiquity's visual cultures. The introduction, for example, provides a list of possible sites of interaction between global and local forces in the production of images, which students and established scholars alike will find generative for framing questions about visual culture. Likewise, multiple chapters utilise the notion of ‘glocalisation’, modelling one possible framework for attending to the multiple scales and spheres at play in artistic production in the period. The proliferation of such frameworks will certainly lead to a more robust engagement with the cultural and creative forces that shaped Late Antiquity's visual cultures.