Workshop

International VISCOM Workshop, December 16-17 2013

Historiographies of Identity IV: 

History and Identity towards the End of the First Millennium

As the fourth in a series of workshops dealing with the social functions of historiography from classical Antiquity to the Middle Ages, this workshop will focus on the later ninth and tenth centuries CE. Starting from the transformation of the historiographical legacy of the Carolingian empire, it aims to contrast the development of historical writing in the Latin West, Byzantium and the Islamic world, exploring its social role for creating and communicating visions of community.  

The Western material shows historians around 900 reacting in different ways to the transformation of the Carolingian empire. Although they realise that the old imperial framework of Charlemagne's empire does not correspond with the actual political realities from the middle of the ninth century onward, they continue to use it as a common baseline from which to construct their own histories and resolve the tension resulting from this discrepancy in different ways. Some try to maintain this past as a vision for the future by keeping it together as a common Christian World. Others reconfigure the imperial past in order to fit it to smaller policies of the present such as the Western Frankish kingdom. Still others reinvent the framework of a Carolingian-Frankish past as a new one such as historians of the Saxon kingdom. Altogether what we observe is an experimental process, in which actual and imagined building blocks of Charlemagne's empire were constantly rearranged from different perspectives triggering reflections about their historical existence. The social function of history to formulate and legitimate such claims is something that everyone seems to take for granted in the Latin West (although this social function may appear differently after we have problematized its transformation from ancient history to the history of the Christian successor states in the post‑Roman West and the Carolingian empire in previous workshops).

From this theoretical perspective of the social function of historical writing to construct identities, communicate visions of community and legitimate political claims, we would like to compare this Western European context to that of the Byzantine and the Islamic world. While in the same period (9th to 11th centuries) the slow decline of the Abbasid Caliphate invites a comparison with the Islamic world, the intensification of reflections about the political, religious and cultural identity of Byzantium (which older historical research addressed as Macedonian Renaissance) invites a comparison with the Byzantine world too. How might this political fragmentation have been reflected (or not) in the writing of historiographical texts? What was the role of history in the social communication about identity and community in Byzantium and the Islamic world? What do these histories look like (as a genre or multiple genres) and how might they be based on models found in historiographical texts of earlier periods (i.e.7th and 8th centuries)? Ideally, in discussion we would like to evaluate how similar/different the forms of and the changes in historical writing were between the Latin West, the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic world from the ninth to the eleventh centuries in order to compare their role for the creation of visions of communities.

Lecture

Central European University (CEU) 
Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies (CEMS)

December 5, 2013 - 18:00 - 19:30, Building:  Nador u. 13, Room:  001

Ioannis Stouraitis (Vienna)

Imperial City-state and "Civil War": Typologizing Byzantine internal armed conflict

If warfare is to be considered as a structural element of the Byzantine socio-political order, this is primarily reflected in the consistent recurrence of the phenomenon of internal armed conflict in the realm of the Christianized imperial city-state of Constantinople between the fourth and the twelfth century. In this period, at least 90 small-scale and large-scale war conflicts that emerged from within the imperial state-frame can be documented. For an answer to the question as to why the allegedly non-warlike Christian Roman society fought so many "civil wars", we should rather look at the Roman notion of the centralized state and the fundamental role of military power in the reproduction of the system of empire. In the current paper I shall argue that present-day analytical models of civil war can be heuristically applied to provide an insightful typology of the phenomenon of Byzantine internal armed conflict.

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New Book!

Adam Izdebski, A Rural Economy in Transition. Asia Minor from Late Antiquity into the Early Middle Ages (JJP Suppl. xviii), Warsaw 2013

A Rural Economy in Transition deals with one of the most important periods in the history of Europe and the Middle East – the transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. In his monograph, Adam Izdebski focuses on the economic history of Anatolia between the fifth and ninth centuries AD, a period which has traditionally posed great challenges to the historian. Because there are very few written sources from which a detailed economic and rural history of the period might be constructed, A. Izdebski has made extensive use of archaeological material in his study; however, he has also been able to integrate a vast amount of new scientific evidence into the traditional debates. This book offers the first major analysis of all the available palynological data -- coming from the investigation of pollen samples taken from lakes and marshes over the last fifty years -- pertaining to the Anatolian region, with comparative data drawn from the entire Mediterranean and Middle East. In addition, it includes a discussion of recent research on the climatic history of both Anatolia in particular, and the Eastern Mediterranean in general. For historians in any field who might wish to engage with the fascinating and under-utilised discipline of palynology, this book provides an easily accessible introduction to the uses of palynological evidence in the construction of historical interpretation. Furthermore, A. Izdebski has succeeded in presenting the history of late antique and Byzantine Anatolia with a new, environmental perspective – and in doing so, he has introduced Byzantine studies into the burgeoning field of environmental and climatic history.

VISCOM Mid-Term Conference

On Thursday, 28^th and Friday, 29^th of November 2013, the SFB Visions of Community: Comparative Approaches to Ethnicity, Region and Empire in Christianity, Islam and Buddhism (400-1600 CE) (VISCOM, F42) will organize the interdisciplinary conference:

Meanings of Community across Medieval Eurasia

The discussion about the many Meanings of Community across Medieval Eurasia stands at the core of the SFB Visions of Community. As such, it will also form the backbone of this conference. On the one hand, the first results of the comparative approaches undertaken over the past years will be presented by members of the project, and on the other, these results will be commented upon by a group of international scholars whose goal it will be to raise as many new questions as there will be solutions proposed. "Community" is a multi-faceted concept, after all. Although it is challenging to formulate ready answers to the question how communities may have emerged as a result of the interaction between universal religions and different alternating identities – be they local, civic, regional, ethnic or imperial – it is equally important to acknowledge these multiplicities, and to arrive at a level of complexity that incorporates the internal varieties of each of the cultural spheres studied within VISCOM. The papers given during this conference reflect this diversity. By sketching out the many shades of the meaning of "community", they will catalyze a further debate on the ideals and realities behind it at different times and in different spaces.

The conference is hosted by the Institute for Social Anthropology (ISA)

Seminar room 1+2/Ground Floor, Apostelgasse 23, 1030 Vienna

"Histories of War in South-Eastern Europe: An Approach in the Longue Durée", International Conference, Athens 7-9 November 2013

Book tip!

Patrick J. Geary, Language and Power in the Early Middle Ages. University Press of New England 2013

For Contents click here

The eminent historian Patrick J. Geary has written a provocative book, based on lectures delivered at the Historical Society of Israel about the role of language and ideology in the study and history of the early Middle Ages. He includes a fascinating discussion of the rush by nationalist philologists to rediscover the medieval roots of their respective vernaculars, the rivalry between vernacular languages and Latin to act as transmitters of Christian sacred texts and administrative documents, and the rather sloppy and ad hoc emergence in different places of the vernacular as the local administrative idiom. This is a fascinating look at the weakness of language as a force for unity: ideology, church authority, and emerging secular power always trumped language.