ABSTRACT
This chapter examines that the comparative aspect remained largely implicit rather than explicit, but across the four days of the conference itself three broad themes emerged ethnicity, religion and power and this focus is represented in the published papers. Religion was usually considered together with power, implicitly or explicitly, in the papers presented, and the two continue to be linked, so the chapter considers them together here. This linkage is at least in part because the focus in the chapter has been pretty resolutely on elites: as Kate Cooper pointed out in Vienna, non-elite women, children and monks were notably absent from most of the discussions. The Byzantine vision of communities that I will consider here is found in the vast body of pro-image literature produced from around 700 until around 850. The chapter talks about two registers here: an official, theological, framework that co-existed with a different, daily life framework.
