In contrast to their western medievalist counterparts, scholars of Byzantine studies are at a disadvantage with regard to surviving primary source materials. I cannot but regard with envy the documents available to my colleagues in the Academy who research the lands of western Europe: to mention a few random examples, the three thousand coroner's inquests analyzed by Barbara Hanawalt and used to inform her remarkably detailed picture of peasant life in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England, the local customs accounts for the (...) port of Exeter that enabled Maryanne Kowaleski to reconstruct the trading operations of this coastal town, the extraordinary cartularies and other documents from the county of Champagne so ably edited and explicated by Theodore Evergates. (shrink)