My Ph.D. dissertation examines the history and archaeology of the monastic institutions of Thrace between the tenth and the late fourteenth centuries. Primarily concerned with the fundamental aspects of monastic life and its modes of interaction with lay society, I sought to investigate the life-cycle, topography and spatial composition of monastic communities in the western hinterland of the imperial capital of Byzantium, the city of Constantinople. My second objective was the investigation of the cultural, economic, and social aspects of the relationship between Thrace and Constantinople as evidenced in the surviving material culture, which consists mainly of architecture and decorative programmes. I followed an interdisciplinary methodology that brings together the systematic analysis of a large corpus of texts associated with monastic institutions -namely wills, monastic foundation documents, monastic archives, letters and imperial laws- with the results of three seasons of archaeological fieldwork. I conducted extensive surveys and recorded remains of monastic complexes including churches and refectories on Mount Ganos (Turkey), on the southern Rhodope Mountains (Greece) and in the cities of Sozopolis and Mesembria (Bulgaria), and explored the cultural ties with Constantinople and other meaningful centers of the Byzantine world.

This thesis uses Byzantine coins in south India to re-examine pre-Islamic maritime trade between the Mediterranean and south India. Analysis of historiographical trends, key textual sources (the Periplous of the Erythreian Sea and the Christian Topography, Book Eleven), and archaeological evidence from the Red Sea, Aksum, the Persian Gulf and India, alongside the numismatic evidence yields two main methodological and three historical conclusions. Methodologically, the multi-disciplinary tradition of Indo-Roman studies needs to incorporate greater sensitivity to the complexities of different evidence types and engage with wider scholarship on the economic and state structures of the Mediterranean and India. Furthermore, pre-Islamic Indo-Mediterranean trade offers an ideal locus for experimenting with a practical global history, particularly using new technologies to enhance data sharing and access to scholarship. Historically, this thesis concludes: first, that the significance of pre-Islamic trade between the Mediterranean and India was minimal for any of the participating states; second, that this trade should be understood in the context of wider Indian Ocean networks, connecting India, Sri Lanka and southeast Asia; third, that the Persian Gulf rather than the Red Sea probably formed the major meeting point of trade from east and west, but this is not yet demonstrable archaeologically, numismatically or textually.

This thesis draws on Freud to understand the innate human need to create boundaries and argues that ambivalence is an inescapable dilemma in their creation. It argues that a re-reading of Freud’s major thesis in Totem and Taboo via an engagement with the Dionysos myth and cult scholarship allows for a new understanding of dominant forms of hegemonic psychic and social formations that attempt to keep in place a false opposition of polis and phusis, self and Other, resulting in the perpetuation of oppressive structures and processes. The primary methodological claim of the thesis is that prior psychoanalytic engagements with cultus scholarship have suffered from being either insufficiently thorough or diffused in attempts to be comparative. A more holistic and detailed approach allows us to ground a psychoanalytic interpretation in the realities of said culture, allowing us to critique Freud’s misreading of Dionysos regarding the Primal Father and the psychic transmission of the Primal Crime. This thesis posits that Dionysos needs to acknowledged as a projection of the Primal Father fantasy linked to a basic ambivalence about the necessity of boundaries in psychosocial life. Using research from the classics and psychoanalysis alongside Queer and post-colonial theory, as well as extensive fieldwork and primary source analysis, this thesis provides a grounded materialist critique of psychoanalysis’ complicity in reproducing a false dichotomy between polis and phusis, a dichotomy that furthers the projection onto marginalised groups whose othering is linked to a fear and desire of a return to phusis and denial of its constant presence in the psyche and polis. This re-reading of Dionysos challenges the defensive structures, which are organised around ideas of subjectification that posit that phusis must be severed from polis/ego and projected onto Dionysos and all groups that threaten the precariousness of these boundaries.