New Publication!

Claudia Rapp & Andreas Külzer (eds.), The Bible in Byzantium: Appropriation, Adaptation, Interpretation, Journal of Ancient Judaism. Supplements 25/6 (2019)

CONTENTS

The Bible is the foundational text for the Byzantine Empire. The papers of this volume explore its reception through appropriation, adaptation and interpretation as articulated in all aspects of Byzantine society. Several sessions at the ISBL held in Vienna, 6 to 10 July 2014 on ‘The Reception of the Bible in Greco-Roman Tradition,’ ‘The Bible between Jews and Christians in Byzantium,’ ‘Biblical Scholarship in Byzantium,’ and ‘Biblical Foundations of Byzantine Identity and Culture’ built the basis of this volume.

Various angles shed light on the Byzantine experience of the Bible. The wide range of source materials that inform the contributions to this volume—from manuscripts and military handbooks to lead seals and pilgrim guides— allows insights into a vivid liturgical tradition, which shapes Orthodox Christianity up today. As a thoroughly Christianized society, the Bible had sunk deep into the cultural DNA of Byzantium. The volume shows the multitude of strategies for the engagement with the Biblical text and the manifold ways in which the Bible message was experienced, articulated and brought to life on a daily basis.

Conference!

Reception, appropriation, and innovation: 

Byzantium between the Christian and Islamic worlds

2nd Annual Edinburgh International Graduate Byzantine Conference

30th November – 1st December 2018

Appleton Tower, Lecture Theater 2, 

11 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9LE

PROGRAMME

Reception and appropriation (whether reuse, imitation, or variation) have long been recognised as necessary tools for the interpretation of Byzantine literature, art, architecture and archaeology, while research on innovations is still at a relatively early stage.

The key theme of this conference is dialogue – dialogue between Byzantium and its neighbouring cultures. The conference will explore all three of the fundamental modes of dialogue and discourse (reception, appropriation and innovation) between Byzantium and its neighbours during any time period from the 5^th-15^th c. Confirmed invited speakers include Professor Claudia Rapp (Vienna), Dr Andrew Marsham (Cambridge), and Father Justin Sinaites (Librarian of St. Catherine’s, Mt. Sinai), in addition to confirmed internal speakers, both Byzantinists and Islamicists.

There will be a small registration fee of £10, and lunch will be provided on both days.We will aim to publish a selection of the papers in a peer-reviewed volume that will bring together the strongest contributions in each area in order to produce an edited volume of high-quality, deep coherence and rich variety. 

The Organising Committee, 

Mathew Barber, Alasdair Grant, Mark Huggins, Matteo Randazzo, Margherita Riso 

New Publication!

András Németh, The Excerpta Constantiniana and the Byzantine Appropriation of the Past, Cambridge University Press 2018, 338pp.

CONTENT

The Excerpta project instigated by the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII turned the enormously rich experience offered by Greek historiography into a body of excerpts distributed across fifty-three distinct thematic collections. In this, the first sustained analysis, András Németh moves from viewing the Excerpta only as a collection of textual fragments to focusing on its dependence from and impact on the surrounding Byzantine culture in the tenth century. He introduces the concept of appropriation and also uses it to study some other key texts created under the Excerpta's influence (De thematibus, De administrando imperio and De ceremoniis). Unlike world chronicles, the Excerpta ignored the chronological dimension of history and fostered the biographical turn in Byzantine historiography. By exploring theoretical questions such as classification and retrieval of historical information and the relationship between knowledge and political power, this book provides powerful new ways for exploring the Excerpta in Byzantine studies and beyond.

• The first in-depth analysis of the historical excerpts, including many key historians from classical and late antiquity, in the context of their production in Byzantium
• Proposes a new and coherent interpretative framework of several key works produced at Byzantine Court in the tenth century
• Tackles theoretical problems beyond Byzantium, such as the understanding of time, history, textual coherence, the practical reading of history and managing information overload

New Book!

Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, Cambridge University Press 2018, 493pp.

CONTENTS

In The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, Geraldine Heng questions the common assumption that the concepts of race and racisms only began in the modern era. Examining Europe's encounters with Jews, Muslims, Africans, Native Americans, Mongols, and the Romani ('Gypsies'), from the 12th through 15th centuries, she shows how racial thinking, racial law, racial practices, and racial phenomena existed in medieval Europe before a recognizable vocabulary of race emerged in the West. Analysing sources in a variety of media, including stories, maps, statuary, illustrations, architectural features, history, saints' lives, religious commentary, laws, political and social institutions, and literature, she argues that religion - so much in play again today - enabled the positing of fundamental differences among humans that created strategic essentialisms to mark off human groups and populations for racialized treatment. Her ground-breaking study also shows how race figured in the emergence of homo europaeus and the identity of Western Europe in this time.

·       Covers a wide range of groups in seven chapters, including Jews, Muslims, Africans, Native Americans, Mongols, and Romani; currently, books on premodern race only address Jews, Muslims, and blackness of skin

·       Women, children, and issues of sexuality are represented and discussed in each chapter making this a pertinent resource for feminist and gender studies, as well as race, medieval, and early modern studies

·       A genuinely interdisciplinary work that contains translations for all foreign and premodern languages discussed within the text

New publication!

Georgios Theotokis, Byzantine Military Tactics in Syria and Mesopotamia in the 10th Century. A Comparative Study, Edinburgh 2018, 360pp.

CONTENTS

This book examines the strategies and military tactics of the Byzantines and their enemies in Eastern Anatolia, Syria and in Upper Mesopotamia in the tenth century. This period of conflict is difficult to define: it was too inactive to be called a ‘war’ but too active to be called a ‘cold war’. Nevertheless, it was a ‘war’, even if it lacked the numerous pitched battles or protracted sieges that defined other periods or other operational theatres of war. This study examines the way the Byzantines innovated and adapted their strategies and tactics to those of their enemies in the East, giving a rich picture of tenth-century Byzantine warfare.

• Examines the major and most important pitched battles of this period and the Byzantine and Arab military manuals which show how armies were organized and deployed in the battlefield
• Looks at how the Byzantines adapted their strategies and tactics to those of their enemies in the 10th century Anatolia, Syria and Mesopotamia
• Shows the transmission of military knowledge through the ages by comparing the military treatises of the 10th century with those from the Roman and Ancient Greek periods

Conference!

Victors and Vanquished in the Euro-Mediterranean Cultures of War in the Middle Ages

18-20 October 2018

Universität Mainz

PROGRAMM

Conflicts significantly influenced medieval societies. The martial cultures which arose as a result developed not only in opposition to, but also under the influence of other cultures. Cultures of war are here understood as the norms, interpretations, attributions of meaning and reflections on war, as well as the forms and practices of war itself. The goal of this workshop is to analyze Euro-Mediterranean cultures of war and the importance of Byzantium for them in a comparative perspective on the basis of three concrete sets of topics: 

1) Remembering Victory and Defeat

2) Practices of Celebrating Victory and Triumphs

3) The Culture of Dealing with the Vanquished

Coping with victory and defeat in war touches upon questions of the legitimation of authority, for instance in historiography, panegyric, pictorial representations and architecture. The celebration of a triumph, by contrast, represents a means of direct communication between rulers, the army and the populace. In this context thanks is expressed to the army, generals, the ruler or another higher authority, and it is here that the embedding of the martial in each individual culture is expressed. The treatment of prisoners of war and the enemy dead likewise belongs to the frame of inquiry, yet is of greater importance for its praxis, as a similar treatment of one's own captives and possibly exchanges of prisoners would have been expected.

In order to facilitate a fruitful discussion and start a concise transcultural comparison, on the one hand, various regions are to be included, Latin Europe as well as the Slavic world, Byzantium or the Islamic-ruled Middle East. On the other hand, disciplines that principally work with texts as well as those that analyze material culture are to be called upon to produce a scholarly contribution.

A Conference of the Leibniz-WissenschaftsCampus Mainz at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz

Organized by: Johannes Pahlitzsch and Jörg Rogge

New Book!

Meredith L. D. Riedel, Leo VI and the Transformation of Byzantine Christian Identity. Writings of an Unexpected Emperor, Cambridge 2018, 220pp.

CONTENTS

 The Byzantine emperor Leo VI (886–912), was not a general or even a soldier, like his predecessors, but a scholar, and it was the religious education he gained under the tutelage of the patriarch Photios that was to distinguish him as an unusual ruler. This book analyses Leo's literary output, focusing on his deployment of ideological principles and religious obligations to distinguish the characteristics of the Christian oikoumene from the Islamic caliphate, primarily in his military manual known as the Taktika. It also examines in depth his 113 legislative Novels, with particular attention to their theological prolegomena, showing how the emperor's religious sensibilities find expression in his reshaping of the legal code to bring it into closer accord with Byzantine canon law. Meredith L. D. Riedel argues that the impact of his religious faith transformed Byzantine cultural identity and influenced his successors, establishing the Macedonian dynasty as a 'golden age' in Byzantium.

Book Tip!

Han Lamers, Greece Reinvented. Transformations of Byzantine Hellenism in Renaissance Italy, Leiden 2015, 396pp.

CONTENTS

Greece Reinvented discusses the transformation of Byzantine Hellenism as the cultural elite of Byzantium, displaced to Italy, constructed it. It explores why and how Byzantine migrants such as Cardinal Bessarion, Ianus Lascaris, and Giovanni Gemisto adopted Greek personas to replace traditional Byzantine claims to the heirship of ancient Rome. In Greece Reinvented, Han Lamers shows that being Greek in the diaspora was both blessing and burden, and explores how these migrants’ newfound ‘Greekness’ enabled them to create distinctive positions for themselves while promoting group cohesion. These Greek personas reflected Latin understandings of who the Greeks ‘really’ were but sometimes also undermined Western paradigms. Greece Reinvented reveals some of the cultural tensions that bubble under the surface of the much-studied transmission of Greek learning from Byzantium to Italy.

International Conference!

BYZANTIUM IN THE ADRIATIC 

FROM THE 6^THTO 12^THCENTURY

Museum of Croatian Archaeological Monuments

Split, 28-30 September 2018

Programme & Abstracts

The field of Byzantine Studies has recently gained impetus in Croatia from the establishment of the Croatian Society for Byzantine Studies, which aspires to become a cross-disciplinary research hub for experts in manifold disciplines related to Byzantine Studies not only in Croatia but in the region as well. Following the auspicious first steps of bringing Byzantine Studies into the focus of Croatian academia and the research community, the Croatian Society for Byzantine Studies now aims to attract internationally acclaimed researchers of diverse disciplinary backgrounds to a forum that will offer an opportunity to discuss a plethora of research topics and questions bearing on the presence of Byzantium in the Adriatic, and specifically to analyze the profile, genesis and transformation of the region in response to the Byzantine world system. The aim is to present and examine old as well as fresh ideas in an innovative way to provide a more complete and in-depth picture of the political, socio-economic, religious, legal, cultural aspects of Byzantine influence, both direct and indirect, detectable in the Adriatic, and particularly the eastern Adriatic coastal area, with a chronological span from the Age of Justinian I to the final disappearance of all vestiges of Byzantine authority and political sway in the region in the twelfth century.

The conference’s special thematic strands include, but are not limited to, the following topics:

§ defining ‘Byzantium’ and its influence in the Adriatic context

§ (dis)continuity of the Byzantine presence in the Adriatic region

§ Adriobyzantinism, Latin Byzantinism, Slavic Byzantinism

§ overlapping zones of influences: problems of centre, periphery and province

§ comparative studies: Ravenna, Pentapolis, Roman Duchy, Venice, Istria, Greece, Sicily, Sardinia, Apulia, Calabria, Benevento, Marche, etc.

§ Byzantium’s influence on the ethnogeneses in the Adriatic coastal area

§ transmission of texts

§ conversion, Christianization and the Church (the interference of jurisdictional and liturgical influences from Constantinople, Rome, Aquileia/Grado; the network of bishoprics; the Cyrillo-Methodian Mission)

§ Byzantine legal traditions

§ Byzantine traditions in diplomatics, language, anthroponymy, toponymy, hagiography

§ Byzantine traditions in social structures (urban elites, aristocracy, family and society)

§ manifestations of Byzantine authority: public institutions, administrative structures, circulation of Byzantine money, seals

§ Byzantine cultural circles in the Adriatic (Justinianic Age, Macedonian dynasty, etc.)

§ settlements, towns, urban history, spatial organization

§ material culture with Byzantine characteristics and provenance in the Adriatic (archaeology, cemeteries, jewellery, weapons, tools, costumes)

§ the so-called Byzantine limes marittimus in the Adriatic (forts, castra, defence systems)

New Publication!

Yannis Stouraitis (ed.), A Companion to the Byzantine Culture of War, ca. 300-1204, Leiden 2018, 490pp.

CONTENTS

This collection of essays on the Byzantine culture of war in the period between the 4th and the 12th centuries offers a new critical approach to the study of warfare as a fundamental aspect of East Roman society and culture in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. The book’s main goal is to provide a critical overview of current research as well as new insights into the role of military organization as a distinct form of social power in one of history’s more long-lived empires. The various chapters consider the political, ideological, practical, institutional and organizational aspects of Byzantine warfare and place it at the centre of the study of social and cultural history. 

Contributors are Salvatore Cosentino, Michael Grünbart, Savvas Kyriakidis, Tilemachos Lounghis, Christos Makrypoulias, Stamatina McGrath, Philip Rance, Paul Stephenson, Yannis Stouraitis, Denis Sullivan, and Georgios Theotokis.

New Publication!

Niels Gaul, Volker Menze, & Csanád Bálint (eds.), Center, Province and Periphery in the Age of Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos: From De Ceremoniis to De Administrando Imperio, Wisebaden 2018, 300pp.

CONTENTS

This comprehensive volume offers new insights into a seminal period of medieval Eastern Roman imperial history: the rule of Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos (913/945–959). Its fifteen chapters are organized around the concepts of center, province and periphery and take the reader from the splendor of Constantinople to the fringes of the empire. They examine life in the imperial city in the age of Constantine VII, the cultural revivals in Byzantium and the Carolingian West, as well as the emperor’s historiographical projects, including his historical excerpts and the famous Book of Ceremonies. Entering the sphere of the provinces, the authors explore visual messages on the coinage of Romanos I Lekapenos and Constantine Porphyrogennetos and its circulation through the provinces, provincial legal culture in the tenth-century empire, and offer a new analysis of Constantine VII’s two military harangues. Spotlights on the empire’s periphery include chapters on borderland trade with the Muslim world, a compelling new theory of the untimely deaths of the children of King Hugh of Italy, and the origins of medieval Croatia in relation to information gained from Constantine VII’s De administrando imperio. The final chapter offers intriguing insights into Constantine VII’s legacy and reception, from later middle Byzantine historiography via the Renaissance editions of the emperor’s treatises to Bavarian King Louis II’s Constantinople-inspired building projects. The volume combines leading scholars and new voices and contains survey chapters with detailed case studies.

New Publication!

W. Pohl, Cl. Gantner, C. Grifoni & M. Pollheimer-Mohaupt (eds.), Transformations of Romanness: Early Medieval Regions and Identities (Millennium Studies 71), Berlin/Boston 2018

CONTENTS

Roman identity is one of the most interesting cases of social identity because in the course of time, it could mean so many different things: for instance, Greek-speaking subjects of the Byzantine empire, inhabitants of the city of Rome, autonomous civic or regional groups, Latin speakers under ‘barbarian’ rule in the West or, increasingly, representatives of the Church of Rome. Eventually, the Christian dimension of Roman identity gained ground. The shifting concepts of Romanness represent a methodological challenge for studies of ethnicity because, depending on its uses, Roman identity may be regarded as ‘ethnic’ in a broad sense, but under most criteria, it is not. Romanness is indeed a test case how an established and prestigious social identity can acquire many different shades of meaning, which we would class as civic, political, imperial, ethnic, cultural, legal, religious, regional or as status groups. This book offers comprehensive overviews of the meaning of Romanness in most (former) Roman provinces, complemented by a number of comparative and thematic studies. A similarly wide-ranging overview has not been available so far.

Workshop!

WAR AND PEOPLEHOOD IN THE MIDDLE AGES 

IN A COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE

Dates: June 18-19, 2018

Venue: Austrian Academy of Sciences, Seminar room, first floor, Hollandstraße 11-13, 1020 Wien

Organisers: Yannis Stouraitis – Ilya Afanasyev

 PROGRAMME

According to Charles Tilly’s famous statement, “war made the state, and the state made war” in the long-drawn process of the emergence of the modern nation-state. If this statement pinpoints the important role of war in the formation of nation-states and national identities in the modern era, the impact of warfare on shaping and reshaping various types of polities and visions of communities in the Middle Ages deserves more attention than it has hitherto received – especially in the context of the ongoing debate regarding modern and pre-modern forms of nationhood and ethnicity. It is a common place to claim that collective identifications, group solidarity and homogeneity are not a cause but rather a product of war and inter-group violence. On the other hand, historical evidence demonstrates that the impact of war on the social cohesion and/or cultural homogenisation of various kinds of groups, such as ethnic or national communities as well as kingdoms, empires and nation-states, can be both constructive and destructive. This means that, even if wars favour discourses of demarcation and othering that can sharpen group boundaries and harden stereotypes, a stronger collective identification is neither a natural nor an automatic result of war.

Our workshop will bring together scholars of various medieval cultures in order to discuss and problematize the role of inter-group and in-group warfare in the emergence or disintegration of medieval social orders, as well as in shaping, changing or marginalizing ideas, values and norms that informed practices of collective identification within them. Two key-note speakers, a sociologist and an anthropologist, will introduce the topic from their disciplinary theoretical view-points with an aim to promote the dialogue and exchange of ideas between modern sociology, anthropology and medieval history. 

Our discussion will be focused on but not restricted to the following key questions:

·      What does studying war tell us about the relationship between ethnicity and political loyalty in medieval polities?

·      Can the role of the ‘entrepreneurs of ethnicity’ be traced for pre-modern history in a way comparable to Rogers Brubaker’s conceptualisation of the ‘ethnic’ conflicts of the 1990s?

·      What was the role of war in the institutionalisation, reproduction, renegotiation and change of cultural meanings and memories?

·      How did war impact upon the creation or renegotiation of various visions and forms of community (ethnic group, kingdom or empire)?

·      What does the history of warfare tell us about the role of pre-modern state structures in maintaining or marginalizing collective identifications?

·      How did the material organisation of pre-modern armies and wars influence the construction and reproduction of collective identifications?

Using these questions as a point of departure, the workshop aims to contribute to an alternative approach to the study of peoplehood in the medieval world by redirecting focus from collective identities in the hard sense to collective identifications as ideological practices. 

The workshop is organised by the FWF-funded project “Contested Empire: Civil War in the Medieval East-Roman Imperial State, c. 500–1204”, hosted at the Department of Byzantine & Modern Greek Studies at the University of Vienna

International Workshop!

Imagined Geographies 

in the Mediterranean, Middle East and Beyond

A two-day workshop co-sponsored by the School of History and Dumbarton Oaks

New Seminar Room, St John’s House, 69 South Street, St Andrews

PROGRAMME

As is well known from the work of Edward Said and other authors, ‘the rise of academic geography in the nineteenth century… was largely complicit with European colonial expansion, to which it contributed through the production of cartographic knowledge, but also by generating “imagined geographies” that mediated the spatial appropriation and colonial subjection of other cultures’ (Bazzaz, Batsaki and Angelov, Imperial Geographies in Byzantine and Ottoman Space, Harvard CHS 2013). Such a connection is clear in the case of the modern Middle East, a term invented in the nineteenth century with a shifting meaning that still remains vague to the present day. However, there are still many aspects of colonial imagined geography that remain largely unexplored. Even less understood is the geographical imagination of other cultures and historical periods. It is well known that Byzantine authors tended to conceive of the world in ancient geographical terms, which they applied to peoples living at their own time; but the precise details of how this was done by different authors is still the subject of ongoing study. As for the Ottoman Empire, it is clear that along with Byzantine territory it also took over from Byzantium the concept of an eastern Roman space (Rum); but the specifics are still largely unclear, as are shifting Ottoman views of the larger world in the early modern and modern period. Finally, East Asia and other regions of the world had their own conceptions of geographical space, which especially in premodern times were radically different from those held by Mediterranean and western European civilizations. This workshop aims to explore the concept of imagined geographies through an interdisciplinary approach, bringing together specialists in historical and literary studies with expertise in different time periods and regions of the world. Specific themes to be discussed include human migration, which carries with it specific notions of geographical space; political and cultural geography in different periods of Byzantine, Ottoman, and European history; and finally, supernatural and eschatological conceptions of space, which especially in premodern times were often associated with distant and unexplored parts of the world.

51st Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies!

The Post-1204 Byzantine World: New Approaches and Novel Directions

School of History, Classics & Archaeology 

The University of Edinburgh
13–15 April 2018 

 

Programme

The 2018 symposium will be dedicated to the later Byzantine world, taking its starting point from the cataclysmic events of 1204.

Especially in recent years, the late Byzantine period has seen an increasing amount of exciting research activity: from continuing Grundlagenforschung (palaeography, critical editions, translations and commentaries) via the reevaluation of key social, political, and economic practices to the application of new methods such as network studies or sociolinguistics, our understanding of the society and politics of the final two hundred and fifty years of Roman rule in the eastern Mediterranean have much increased. If down to the late 1990s Laskarid and Palaiologan Byzantium was often still perceived as one of the (many) Cinderellas of Byzantine Studies, this is clearly no longer the case. Wherever one looks these days, exciting postgraduate projects are under way; in an increasing number of universities, Byzantine Studies is taught by colleagues with expertise in the later Byzantine period.

The 51^st Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies seeks to take stock of these novel approaches to the post-1204 Byzantine world by bringing together established researchers, new voices, and open communications on all aspects of this newly polycentric world that stretched from Constantinople to Mystras and from Arta to Trebizond: we will explore the functioning of late Byzantine politics – the interaction of emperors and rulers with aristocratic, ecclesiastical, urban elites and the demos – look at the cultural, religious, and literary life in the various post-1204 polities from various angles, and explore the fragile position of the dwindling Eastern Roman polities in their wider Mediterranean context, from the Italian powers via the Balkans to the Mamluks, Ottomans, and Mongols.

Symposium venue

The Symposium will be held in the University of Edinburgh’s School of History, Classics and Archaeology, located in the Willam Roberson Wing (Doorway 4) of the Old Medical School on Teviot Place (EH8 9AG), as well as in the Teviot Lecture Theatre (Doorway 5) of the same building (for campus maps, please consult ed.ac.uk/maps/maps; to download: ed.ac.uk/maps/download). 

The University of Edinburgh’s Central Area – along Teviot Place, recently renovated Bristo Square, and around beautiful George Square – is within convenient walking distance of Waverley Railway Station, Princes Street and the Royal Mile; close to the National Museum and National Gallery of Scotland; and only a short walk (15 minutes) from the Palace of Holyroodhouse and Arthur’s Seat. More information about the city and what to do during your stay can be found here: ed.ac.uk/visit/cityand edinburgh.org.