Byzantine News

"Intelligible Beauty" recent research on Byzantine jewellery. Edited by Chris Entwistle and Noël Adams Click here to read

From NY Times: All images of public-domain artworks in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection — about 375,000 — are now free for anyone to use however they may please.The museum announced on Tuesday that it had changed its open access policy to allow free, unrestricted use of any images of artworks in the public domain, using the license designation Creative Commons Zero, known as CC0. Click here to access the collection

The classical book on Byzantine warfare by John Haldon is now online. Click below to read and enjoy!

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 :

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...

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...

An event which influenced the history of both Byzantium and the Western states, the crusades pose many problems to the researchers of today. Were the crusades a Holy War in Byzantium? The late G.T. Dennis tried to give an answer to this question in a Dumbarton Oaks volume. Click here to read more

An interesting article by C. Kelty, author of Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (Experimental Futures) on virtual libraries and their role in shaping knowledge: The disappearing virtual library The shutdown of library.nu is creating a virtual showdown between would-be learners and the publishing industry.  Last week a website called "library.nu" disappeared. A coalition of international scholarly publishers accused the site of piracy and convinced a judge in Munich to shut it down. Library.nu (formerly Gigapedia) had offered, if the reports are to be believed, between 400,000 and a million digital books for free. And not just any books - not romance novels or the latest best-sellers - but scholarly books: textbooks, secondary treatises, obscure monographs, biographical analyses, technical manuals, collections of cutting-edge research in engineering, mathematics, biology, social science and humanities. Read more