From the Editor

From the Editor Sabine R. Huebner This issue was produced in part under the aegis of my predecessor, Professor Andrew Cain, who steered the ship expertly over the past five years, and I cannot thank him enough for his generous and patient introduction to the complex business of being editor-in-chief. I am also delighted to have gathered around me a stellar editorial board that will support this journal in the years ahead. The Journal of Late Antiquity is composed of veteran editors, as well as younger members in our field, whose expertise covers a wide variety of areas, regions, and topics of the discipline. I feel very honored to be following in the footsteps of Ralph W. Mathisen, Noel Lenski, and most recently Andy Cain, and hope to do the journal justice in the years to come. The Journal of Late Antiquity, which has already won several awards in its fifteen-year history, will continue to encourage cutting-edge and interdisciplinary research on all methodological, geographical, and chronological facets of Late Antiquity, defined roughly as the period from ca. 250–800 ad. The entire field of late antique studies will be represented—bridging disciplines and late antique peoples from the late Roman, western European, Byzantine, Sassanid, and early Islamic worlds and their direct exchanges with their respective neighboring peoples and trading partners, without slipping into the arbitrariness of a thematic global setting. This cross-disciplinary cooperation in ancient studies has become a matter of course over the past few decades: from my first days as a student, I myself worked in supra-departmental interdisciplinary research networks that, in addition to the traditional text- and material-based subjects of classical studies—such as ancient history, classical philology, Egyptology, archaeology—had also already included Arabic studies, Jewish studies, art history, ethnology, law, and comparative religious studies. My doctoral studies in the interdisciplinary doctoral program in Jena on "Leitbilder der Spätantike," my postdoctoral work at, amongst other institutions, the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW), and currently as head of the Department of Ancient Civilizations at the University of Basel, have shaped my impression of late antique studies in its widest sense. Although appearing small in scope, late antique studies encompasses the cosmos of the university (universitas), pioneering the possibilities of interdisciplinarity and the challenges and opportunities of true consilience. My goal is to further the Journal of Late Antiquity's heartfelt mission of an all-encompassing, multidisciplinary treatment of Late Antiquity in all its multiregional and multilingual facets, while also affording a wide scope to new trends, particularly, collaborative opportunities with the natural sciences. [End Page 1] The range of disciplines working on Late Antiquity has expanded further since the first edition of the Journal of Late Antiquity in 2008. Without exerting influence, as an editor has no control over the nature of submissions, moving forward I would like to see even broader consideration of the so-called palaeosciences—e.g., palaeoclimatology, palaeogenetics, bioarchaeology—as well as digital technologies. These evidentiary pools are increasingly taking up important space in our transdisciplinary dialogue on late antiquity, and are providing new data and fascinating insights into ancient genomes, migrations of peoples, livestock and crops, the spread of infectious diseases, and ancient climatic variability and change, by which some text-focused reasoning has already been upended. I am thrilled that this issue gives consideration to these new methods, such as David Devore's and Scott Kennedy's contribution to the pestilence during the reign of Emperor Maximinus II Daia—arguably not a pandemic, but a regionally-limited epidemic in Syria and adjacent areas—and a review of Kyle Harper's new book Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History. Similarly, I hope for greater consideration of research from countries outside the western-oriented, European-Anglo-American context, as this journal also devotes attention to the history of the Near and Middle East, and North and East Africa. This spring issue of the Journal of Late Antiquity collects eight innovative contributions on multiple regions and aspects of the late antique world. The issue opens with a contribution from Adrastos Omissi on "Hamstrung Horses: Dating Constantine's...