Cosmos and Community in Early Medieval Art, which revisits the subject matter of the author's 2012 Bryn Mawr dissertation, addresses the question of how the Mediterranean societies of Byzantium, the kingdom of the Franks, and Islam "roughly from A.D. 700 to 1000" (p. 5) made use of cosmological imagery. After the brief "Preface and Acknowledgments" which addresses the thorny question of transliteration, the "Introduction," entitled "Solitude and Community," presents the author's dichotomy between the shared understanding of cosmology by the "universal community . . . experienced by all in contemplation of the stars" and that of the "solitary individual" with a particular point of view (p. 9). The intellectual underpinning for this relationship, as noted in a review of the exhibition "Time and Cosmos in Greco-Roman Antiquity," curated by Alexander Jones at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (October 19, 2016 - April 23, 2017), existed "Because the heavens and the earth were thought to be connected in so many ways, the destinies of nations as well as individuals presumably could be read by someone with expertise in the arrangements of the sun, the moon, the known planets and constellations in the zodiac." The author's opening anecdote regarding Septimius Severus (193-211) illustrates this. The emperor had two zodiacs with different ascendants painted in his reception halls so that astrologically knowledgeable visitors would not "share Severus's own knowledge regarding the time of his death!" (p. 2; exclamation point added).