In twelve chapters, the contributors to this volume provide a survey of current scholarly thinking about medieval Cyprus, with an emphasis on material culture. The stress throughout is on the links between Cyprus and Byzantium, especially Constantinople, with the Arab presence on the island noted—between 651and 965 Cyprus was a tributary of both the Byzantine Empire and the Arab Caliphate—but largely downplayed, and the late twelfth-century occupation by King Richard I (Coeur de Lion) of England beyond the remit of most of the chapters.

The book has two great strengths. First, it provides an accessible synthesis of much (though far from all) recent archaeological research, otherwise available mostly in scattered and often hard-to-find excavation reports. In this respect, three chapters stand out: Demetrios Michaelides's “The Significance of the Basilica at Agioi Pente of Yeroskipou” (1–16); Marcus Rautman's “The Troodos in Twilight: A Provincial Landscape in the Time of Justinian” (39–56); and Eleni Procopiou's “The Katalymata ton Plakoton: New Light from the Recent Archaeological research on Cyprus” (69–98). There is also a solid synthetic overview of the Byzantine ecclesiastical architecture of the island, drawing on over 200 monuments surviving in whole or in part, extracted from his 2008 University of Michigan Ph.D. dissertation by one of the editors of the volume, Charles Stewart. In a similar vein, David Metcalf provides an itemized summary of issues and questions raised in his two volumes on Cypriot seals (Byzantine Lead Seals from Cyprus [Nicosia: Cyprus Research Center, 2004 and forthcoming]) in “The North-South Divide in Byzantine Cyprus: Some Evidence from Lead Seals and Coins” (57–67).

Second, a hitherto largely unknown church is published for the first time by one of the doyennes of Cypriot painting, Annemarie Weyl Carr. Carr's “The Program of the Panagia Pergaminiotissa: A Narrative in Perspective” (167–185) provides a fascinating introduction to the fragmentary wall paintings presenting early episodes from the life of the virgin (here with a focus on her parents, Anna and Joachim) and places these early twelfth-century frescoes firmly in context.

Finally, Tassos Papacostas, in “Decoding Cyprus from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance: Discordant Visions, Saints, and Sacred Topography” (187–201) concludes the volume with the intriguing insight that Cypriot self-presentation is often quite different from how Cyprus is presented in external sources. He leaves us with the extraordinary image of the Kyrenia Gate in Nicosia, with Latin, Ottoman and English imperial inscriptions—but nothing in the Greek spoken on the island.