Spatialities of Byzantine Culture from the Human Body to the Universe

Spatialities of Byzantine Culture from the Human Body to the Universe PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004523006
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 705

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Book Description
Compensating a four-decades shortfall, this collective volume is the first reader in Byzantine spatial studies. It offers a diversity of topics and scientific approaches, articulated by up-to-date interdisciplinary dialogue, and reflects on the future challenges of Byzantine spatial studies.

Spatialities of Byzantine Culture from the Human Body to the Universe

Spatialities of Byzantine Culture from the Human Body to the Universe PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004523006
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 705

Get Book Here

Book Description
Compensating a four-decades shortfall, this collective volume is the first reader in Byzantine spatial studies. It offers a diversity of topics and scientific approaches, articulated by up-to-date interdisciplinary dialogue, and reflects on the future challenges of Byzantine spatial studies.

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.

The Conqueror's Gift

The Conqueror's Gift PDF Author: Michael Maas
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069125902X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
"An account of the central role that ethnography played in the Roman empire and its transformation in Late Antiquity. Ethnography, broadly understood, is a key element in the toolkit of every empire, as important as armies, tax-collectors, or ambassadors. It helps rulers articulate cultural differences with outsiders and sometimes bridge them, and it lets the inhabitants of an empire, especially those who guide its course, understand themselves and their place in the midst of the enemies, allies, and friends who surround them. Whenever provinces are drawn, peace treaties and alliances framed, diplomats sent on mission, decisions taken to go to war, or simply life lived in the midst of unfamiliar voices, some kind of ethnographic vision must come into play. This ethnographic infrastructure, as ancient historian Michael Maas calls it, supports the empire's view of itself regarding the nations of the world, and it shapes and reflects actual interactions with them. Ethnography is not simply a reflection of changes. It also enables change by providing terms and concepts that give voice to the articulation of new circumstances. In this book, Maas argues that, to understand how the Roman Empire transformed in the crucial period of Late Antiquity, the empire's ethnographic underpinnings, especially as they were affected by Christianity, must be examined. As Maas demonstrates, Romans knew they lived in a world of great cultural diversity, movement, and instability. They believed that their empire imposed order upon it. Images of barbarians filled public spaces throughout the empire as reminders of Roman control. Writers likewise filled their pages with descriptions of foreigners in a wide variety of genres. These ethnographies, according to Maas, served three general functions. First, they described foreign peoples, placing them in established and accessible systems of knowledge. Second, they judged them on a register of distance from Roman norms, with "most like us" the best possible evaluation. Third, ethnography indicated explicitly or implicitly what the possibilities of participation within the imperial community might be. In other words, the gift of ethnography possessed for the conquerors a mechanism of imperial transformation"--

Beyond Icons

Beyond Icons PDF Author: William R. Caraher
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040146228
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
This book is a collective reflection on the relationship between theory and methods, as practiced by American archaeologists of the Byzantine period in Greece, Turkey, Ukraine, and Egypt between the 1990s and 2020s. The eleven authors represent a generational voice that employed theory to redirect the established narratives of the golden age of Byzantine archaeology (1960s–1980s) that privileged art and religion. Beyond Icons: Theories and Methods in Byzantine Archaeology in North America originated in three conferences (2010, 2012, and 2013) organized by the Program of Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C. Acknowledging the role that Dumbarton Oaks played in the golden age of Byzantine archaeology, Program Director Margaret Mullett designed these conferences as exercises in conceptualizing the field’s future. The chapters consider theories of fragments, methodologies in regional surface survey, stratigraphy, habitus, phenomenology, gender theory, craft, dreams, and sound. In doing so, they capture a moment in the study of Byzantine archaeology and material culture and chart out future directions for the field. This book will appeal to scholars and students alike, as well as all those interested in Byzantine Studies, medieval archaeology (particularly of the eastern Mediterranean), and Byzantine material culture. It will also be of interest to anyone seeking to understand the emerging narrative of a global Middle Ages. The chapters reflect the ways in which the study of Byzantine archaeology was shaped by the scholarship of those working in the United States and Canada.

Fieldnotes in the Critical Study of Religion

Fieldnotes in the Critical Study of Religion PDF Author: Vaia Touna
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350251666
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
This book introduces students to the so-called classics of the field from the 19th and 20th centuries, whilst challenging readers to apply a critical lens. Instead of representing scholars and their works as virtually timeless, each contributor provides sufficient background on the classic work in question so that readers not only understand its novelty and place in its own time, but are able to arrive at a critical understanding of whether its approach to studying religion continues to be useful to them today. Scholars discussed include Muller, Durkheim, Freud and Eliade. Fieldnotes in the Critical Study of Religion: Revisiting Classical Theorists therefore offers a novel way into writing both a history and ethnography of the discipline, helping readers to see how it has changed and inviting them to consider what-if anything-endures and thereby unites these diverse authors into a common field.

Fieldnotes in the Critical Study of Religion

Fieldnotes in the Critical Study of Religion PDF Author: Vaia Touna
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350251674
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
This book introduces students to the so-called classics of the field from the 19th and 20th centuries, whilst challenging readers to apply a critical lens. Instead of representing scholars and their works as virtually timeless, each contributor provides sufficient background on the classic work in question so that readers not only understand its novelty and place in its own time, but are able to arrive at a critical understanding of whether its approach to studying religion continues to be useful to them today. Scholars discussed include Muller, Durkheim, Freud and Eliade. Fieldnotes in the Critical Study of Religion: Revisiting Classical Theorists therefore offers a novel way into writing both a history and ethnography of the discipline, helping readers to see how it has changed and inviting them to consider what-if anything-endures and thereby unites these diverse authors into a common field.

Literary Territories

Literary Territories PDF Author: Scott Fitzgerald Johnson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190221232
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Literary Territories argues that the literature of Late Antiquity shared a defining aesthetic sensibility which treated the classical "inhabited world," the oikoumene, as a literary metaphor for the collection and organization of knowledge.

Trends and Turning Points

Trends and Turning Points PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004395741
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
Trends and Turning Points presents sixteen articles, examining the discursive construction of the late antique and Byzantine world, focusing specifically on the utilisation of trends and turning points to make stuff from the past, whether texts, matter, or action, meaningful. Contributions are divided into four complementary strands, Scholarly Constructions, Literary Trends, Constructing Politics, and Turning Points in Religious Landscapes. Each strand cuts across traditional disciplinary boundaries and periodisation, placing historical, archaeological, literary, and architectural concerns in discourse, whilst drawing on examples from the full range of the medieval Roman past. While its individual articles offer numerous important insights, together the volume collectively rethinks fundamental assumptions about how late antique and Byzantine studies has and continues to be discursively constructed. Contributors are: David Barritt, Laura Borghetti, Nikolas Churik, Elif Demirtiken, Alasdair C. Grant, Stephen Humphreys, Mirela Ivanova, Hugh Jeffery, Valeria Flavia Lovato, Francesco Lovino, Kosuke Nakada, Jonas Nilsson, Theresia Raum, Maria Rukavichnikova, and Milan Vukašinović.

Envisioning Worlds in Late Antique Art

Envisioning Worlds in Late Antique Art PDF Author: Anna Cecilia Olovsdotter
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110546841
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
It has long been an accepted assumption that the abstracted mode of visual representation that emerged in late antiquity reflected a collective shift from the outer-directed and ’material’ world-view of classical antiquity to an inner-directed, ’spiritual’ mentality informed by Christianity: the purpose of this volume is to offer a more nuanced and diverse image of the nature and meanings of abstraction and symbolism in late antique and early medieval art, beyond normative intepretation models, and from a number of different methodological and interpretative perspectives. In ten chapters, ten authors specialised in various fields of late-antique and Byzantine art explore the historiographical background of the ’spiritual’ interpretation paradigm, neuroscientific and theological dimensions of Christian visual aesthetics, meanings and motive factors behind apparently wholly abstract and aniconic compositions, symbolic motifs and schemes for visualising cosmic order and the cosmic state of Christ, and the re-use of symbolic Greco-Roman themes in Christian contexts. The result is a multi-focal image of late antique abstraction and symbolism that illuminates the heterogeneity and complexity of the phenomena and of their study.

Byzantine Epirus

Byzantine Epirus PDF Author: Myrto Veikou
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004227466
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 903

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Book Description
Much of the past twenty years of scholarship on late-antique and medieval landscapes and settlement has introduced theoretical patterns reflecting meta-narratives of evolution and transition. This book draws on 5 years of archaeological and topographical fieldwork in order to attempt a rereading of Byzantine texts in accordance with recent perceptions of the historicity of space. The result is a fresh interpretation of settlement in Western Greece (Southern Epirus and Aetoloacarnania) from 600 to 1200 AD, springing from a postmodern theoretical background. While representing real progress in the treatment of the Middle Byzantine regions, the book makes an ecological contribution to historical and social studies through a new evaluation of the transformation of medieval settlement as a result of interaction between physical/social space and human agency.