Identity and the Other in Byzantium

Identity and the Other in Byzantium PDF Author: Koray Durak
Publisher:
ISBN: 9786052116968
Category : Byzantine Empire
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description

Identity and the Other in Byzantium

Identity and the Other in Byzantium PDF Author: Koray Durak
Publisher:
ISBN: 9786052116968
Category : Byzantine Empire
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description


The Routledge Handbook on Identity in Byzantium

The Routledge Handbook on Identity in Byzantium PDF Author: Michael Edward Stewart
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429633408
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description
This volume is the first to focus solely on how specific individuals and groups in Byzantium and its borderlands were defined and distinguished from other individuals and groups from the mid-fourth to the close of the fifteenth century. It gathers chapters from both established and emerging scholars from a wide range of disciplines across history, art, archaeology, and religion to provide an accurate representation of the state of the field both now and in its immediate future. The handbook is divided into four subtopics that examine concepts of group and specific individual identity which have been chosen to provide methodologically sophisticated and multidisciplinary perspectives on specific categories of group and individual identity. The topics are Imperial Identities; Romanitas in the Late Antique Mediterranean; Macro and Micro Identities: Religious, Regional, and Ethnic Identities, and Internal Others; and Gendered Identities: Literature, Memory, and Self in Early and Middle Byzantium. While no single volume could ever provide a comprehensive vision of identities on the vast variety of peoples within Byzantium over nearly a millennium of its history, this handbook represents a milestone in offering a survey of the vibrant surge of scholarship examining the numerous and oft-times fluctuating codes of identity that shaped and transformed Byzantium and its neighbours during the empire’s long life.

Art and Identity in Thirteenth-Century Byzantium

Art and Identity in Thirteenth-Century Byzantium PDF Author: Antony Eastmond
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351957228
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
The church of Hagia Sophia in Trebizond, built by the emperor Manuel I Grand Komnenos (1238-63) in the aftermath of the fall of Constantinople to the Fourth Crusade, is the finest surviving Byzantine imperial monument of its period. Art and Identity in Thirteenth-Century Byzantium is the first investigation of the church in more than thirty years, and is extensively illustrated in colour and black-and-white, with many images that have never previously been published. Antony Eastmond examines the architectural, sculptural and painted decorations of the church, placing them in the context of contemporary developments elsewhere in the Byzantine world, in Seljuq Anatolia and among the Caucasian neighbours of Trebizond. Knowledge of this area has been transformed in the last twenty years, following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The new evidence that has emerged enables a radically different interpretation of the church to be reached, and raises questions of cultural interchange on the borders of the Christian and Muslim worlds of eastern Anatolia, the Caucasus and Persia. This study uses the church and its decoration to examine questions of Byzantine identity and imperial ideology in the thirteenth century. This is central to any understanding of the period, as the fall of Constantinople in 1204 divided the Byzantine empire and forced the successor states in Nicaea, Epiros and Trebizond to redefine their concepts of empire in exile. Art is here exploited as significant historical evidence for the nature of imperial power in a contested empire. It is suggested that imperial identity was determined as much by craftsmen and expectations of imperial power as by the emperor's decree; and that this was a credible alternative Byzantine identity to that developed in the empire of Nicaea.

Byzantium and the Modern Greek Identity

Byzantium and the Modern Greek Identity PDF Author: David Ricks
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351953680
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
Perhaps because of the fact that modern Greece is, through the Orthodox Church, inextricably linked with the Byzantine heritage, the precise meaning of this heritage, in its various aspects, has hitherto been surprisingly little discussed by scholars. This collection of specially commissioned essays aims to present an overview of some of the different, and often conflicting, tendencies manifested by modern Greek attitudes to Byzantium since the late eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The aim is to show just how formative views of Byzantium have been for modern Greek life and letters: for historiography and imaginative literature, on the one hand, and on the other, for language, law, and the definition of a culture. All Greek has been translated, and the volume is aimed at Byzantinists and Neohellenists alike.

Hellenism in Byzantium

Hellenism in Byzantium PDF Author: Anthony Kaldellis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521297295
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This text was the first systematic study of what it meant to be 'Greek' in late antiquity and Byzantium, an identity that could alternatively become national, religious, philosophical, or cultural. Through close readings of the sources, Professor Kaldellis surveys the space that Hellenism occupied in each period; the broader debates in which it was caught up; and the historical causes of its successive transformations. The first section (100-400) shows how Romanisation and Christianisation led to the abandonment of Hellenism as a national label and its restriction to a negative religious sense and a positive, albeit rarefied, cultural one. The second (1000-1300) shows how Hellenism was revived in Byzantium and contributed to the evolution of its culture. The discussion looks closely at the reception of the classical tradition, which was the reason why Hellenism was always desirable and dangerous in Christian society, and presents a new model for understanding Byzantine civilisation.

Romanland

Romanland PDF Author: Anthony Kaldellis
Publisher: Belknap Press
ISBN: 0674986512
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
A leading historian argues that in the empire we know as Byzantium, the Greek-speaking population was actually Roman, and scholars have deliberately mislabeled their ethnicity for the past two centuries for political reasons. Was there ever such a thing as Byzantium? Certainly no emperor ever called himself “Byzantine.” And while the identities of minorities in the eastern empire are clear—contemporaries speak of Slavs, Bulgarians, Armenians, Jews, and Muslims—that of the ruling majority remains obscured behind a name made up by later generations. Historical evidence tells us unequivocally that Byzantium’s ethnic majority, no less than the ruler of Constantinople, would have identified as Roman. It was an identity so strong in the eastern empire that even the conquering Ottomans would eventually adopt it. But Western scholarship has a long tradition of denying the Romanness of Byzantium. In Romanland, Anthony Kaldellis investigates why and argues that it is time for the Romanness of these so-called Byzantines to be taken seriously. In the Middle Ages, he explains, people of the eastern empire were labeled “Greeks,” and by the nineteenth century they were shorn of their distorted Greekness and became “Byzantine.” Only when we understand that the Greek-speaking population of Byzantium was actually Roman will we fully appreciate the nature of Roman ethnic identity. We will also better understand the processes of assimilation that led to the absorption of foreign and minority groups into the dominant ethnic group, the Romans who presided over the vast multiethnic empire of the east.

Christians Shaping Identity from the Roman Empire to Byzantium

Christians Shaping Identity from the Roman Empire to Byzantium PDF Author: Geoffrey Dunn
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004301577
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 536

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Book Description
The essays collected in Christians Shaping Identity celebrate Pauline Allen’s significant contribution to early Christian, late antique, and Byzantine studies, especially concerning bishops, heresy/orthodoxy and christology. Covering the period from earliest Christianity to middle Byzantium, the first eighteen essays explore the varied ways in which Christians constructed their own identity and that of the society around them. A final four essays explore the same theme within Roman Catholicism and oriental Christianity in the late 19th to 21st centuries, with particular attention to the subtle relationships between the shaping of the early Christian past and the moulding of Christian identity today. Among the many leading scholars represented are Averil Cameron and Elizabeth A. Clark.

Visions of Community in the Post-Roman World

Visions of Community in the Post-Roman World PDF Author: Walter Pohl
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317001362
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 588

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Book Description
This volume looks at 'visions of community' in a comparative perspective, from Late Antiquity to the dawning of the age of crusades. It addresses the question of why and how distinctive new political cultures developed after the disintegration of the Roman World, and to what degree their differences had already emerged in the first post-Roman centuries. The Latin West, Orthodox Byzantium and its Slavic periphery, and the Islamic world each retained different parts of the Graeco-Roman heritage, while introducing new elements. For instance, ethnicity became a legitimizing element of rulership in the West, remained a structural element of the imperial periphery in Byzantium, and contributed to the inner dynamic of Islamic states without becoming a resource of political integration. Similarly, the political role of religion also differed between the emerging post-Roman worlds. It is surprising that little systematic research has been done in these fields so far. The 32 contributions to the volume explore this new line of research and look at different aspects of the process, with leading western Medievalists, Byzantinists and Islamicists covering a wide range of pertinent topics. At a closer look, some of the apparent differences between the West and the Islamic world seem less distinctive, and the inner variety of all post-Roman societies becomes more marked. At the same time, new variations in the discourse of community and the practice of power emerge. Anybody interested in the development of the post-Roman Mediterranean, but also in the relationship between the Islamic World and the West, will gain new insights from these studies on the political role of ethnicity and religion in the post-Roman Mediterranean.

The Late Byzantine Romance in Context

The Late Byzantine Romance in Context PDF Author: Ioannis Smarnakis
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040021190
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
This book investigates issues of identity and narrativity in late Byzantine romances in a Mediterranean context, covering the chronological span from the capture of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204 to the 16th century. It includes chapters not only on romances that were written and read in the broader Byzantine world but also on literary texts from regions around the Mediterranean Sea. The volume offers new insights and covers a variety of interrelated subjects concerning the narrative representations of self-identities, gender, and communities, the perception of political and cultural otherness, and the interaction of space and time with identity formation. The chapters focus on texts from the Byzantine, western European, and Ottoman worlds, thus promoting a cross-cultural approach that highlights the role of the Mediterranean as a shared environment that facilitated communications, cultural interaction, and the trading and reconfiguration of identities. The volume will appeal to a wide audience of researchers and students alike, specializing in or simply interested in cultural studies, Byzantine, western medieval, and Ottoman history and literature.

Eastern Approaches to Byzantium

Eastern Approaches to Byzantium PDF Author: Antony Eastmond
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351942131
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
The eastern frontier of Byzantium and the interaction of the peoples that lived along it are the themes of this book. With a focus on the ninth to thirteenth centuries and dealing with both art history and history, the essays provide reconsiderations of Byzantine policy on its eastern borders, new interpretations and new materials on Byzantine relations with the Georgians, Armenians and Seljuqs, as well as studies on the writing of history among these peoples. Presenting research from Russia and Georgia as well as Europe and the USA, the contributors stress the interaction and interdependence of all the peoples along this frontier zone, and consider the different ways in which the political and cultural power of Byzantium was appropriated. They provide important comparative evidence for the relationship between local and Byzantine cultures, and open up new avenues for research into the history of eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus. The volume arises from the thirty-third Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies held at the University of Warwick in March 1999.