Our approach in the edited volume entitled “Wilderness Revisited: Its Essence, Perception, Description and Image in Byzantium and Beyond” is a bottom-up endeavour based on actual, ongoing research in various academic fields providing expertise and new scholarly results and, thus, enabling meaningful comparisons between different countries, continents and cultures. It is by no means a preconceived concept imposed by somebody, but the embodiment of one of the core visions of the research initiative “Maps of Power” .

Our starting point is twofold. On the one hand, we have been inspired by an article of the geographer and environmental historian William Cronon with the title “The Trouble with Wilderness; Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” , who writes, amongst others, on the perception of “Wilderness”. On the other hand, the editor of this volume attended two workshops in Oxford in the years 2023 and 2024 which spurred him to delve deeper into the topic. The volume’s aim is to enrich further discussion in academia and to connect it to the public discourse in Central Europe (but also beyond).