Byzantine News

Full access to a major resource for the study of Byzantine art: The Glory of Byzantium: Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era, edited by Helen C. Evans, William D. Wixom :

A new book on Hagia Sophia and the Byzantine Aesthetic Experience by Nadine Schibille. From the introduction: Paramount in the shaping of early Byzantine identity was the construction of the church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople (532-537 CE). This book examines the edifice from the perspective of aesthetics to define the concept of beauty and the meaning of art in early Byzantium. Byzantine aesthetic thought is re-evaluated against late antique Neoplatonism and the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius that offer fundamental paradigms for the late antique attitude towards art and beauty. Click here to browse the book.

Medieval Greek romances were a very popular genre in Byzantium. P. Roilos' groundbreaking volume on the topic is now available online. Here is a passage from the conclusions: Through their multilayered responses to the past and their present, the Komnenian novels mediate first between antiquity and the Middle Ages and, second, between the Middle Ages and modernity. Due to its inherent discursive plasticity, the genre of the novel offered the Komnenian writers a dynamic literary medium for the exploration of a number of ideological and conceptual tensions ensuing from originally antithetical but often ultimately complementary conceptual and cultural categories. No doubt these tensions marked Byzantine culture from its initial formation to its final exhaustion. However, all these opposing forces reached their acme in the twelfth century: Hellenism and Christianity, antiquity and “modernity,” tradition and experimentation, secular and sacred, “high” and “low,” pleasure and asce...

A very interesting lecture by Stratis Papaioannou (Brown) at the American School of Classical Studies, Athens (October 2014). Byzantine literature remains relatively exotic for modern readers, unlike its predecessor, Classical literature, or commensurate aspects of Byzantine culture, such as visual art.This lecture ventures a comprehensive view of Byzantine literature by examining notions and practices of authorship. Though neither classical nor medieval Greek have a single word that corresponds exactly to our “authorship,” Byzantine rhetoric and manuscript book culture reveal an intricate web of meanings for what an author is. Vacillating between authenticity and creative impersonation, Byzantine authors signal modernity. You can watch the lecture here.

In December, Dumbarton Oaks Research Center for Byzantine Studies will host a new colloquium on Byzantine emotions and passions. Byzantinists were early into the field of the study of emotion with Henry Maguire’s ground-breaking article on sorrow, published in 1977. But since then classicists and western medievalists have developed new ways of understanding how emotional communities work and where the ancients’ concepts of emotion differ from our own. It is time perhaps to celebrate Maguire’s work, but also to look at what is distinctive about Byzantine emotion. We should like to encourage speakers to focus on a single emotion and to use it as a vantage point to investigate central aspects of the Byzantine worldview. We want to look at emotions as both cognitive and relational processes. Our focus is not only the construction of emotions with respect to perception and cognition; we are also interested in how emotions were communicated and exchanged across broad (multi)linguistic, p...

Another free ebook on Crusades and Byzantium to download from Dumbarton Oaks edited by Angeliki Laiou: The Crusades from the Perspective of Byzantium and the Muslim World is the result of scholarly reassessments of the Crusades on the 900th anniversary of the appearance of crusading armies outside Nicaea. The views expressed here complement the considerable number of other examinations that focused on the internal, Western, aspects of the movement on the 900th anniversary of the Council of Clermont.  The volume opens with an introduction to the historiography of the Crusades, followed by wide-ranging discussions covering four topics: holy war in Byzantium and Islam; the approaches and attitudes of the various peoples affected by and involved in the Crusades; the movement's effect on the economies of the eastern Mediterranean; and the influence of the Crusades on the art and architecture of the East.  The essays in this volume demonstrate that there were, on the easter...

Armenia and the Council of Chalcedon. Click here to access the book