Author: Liz James
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351945017
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400
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Book Description
The papers in this volume derive from the 31st Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies held for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies at the University of Sussex, Brighton, in March 1997. Desire, sex, love and the erotic are not terms usually associated with Byzantium and Byzantine Studies, unlike celibacy, virginity and asceticism, which more readily spring to mind. In order to examine whether the balance between these two extremes needed redressing, desire and denial was adopted as the theme for this symposium. The papers in this volume, by a group of international scholars, explore the many different aspects of Byzantine perceptions towards their own humanity and the frailties of that humanity. Using evidence from archaeology, art history and literary texts, ranging from sermons to legal documents, these chapters reveal writings about love, both secular and religious; images of sexuality and sensuality; the law; and Byzantine attitudes to bodies and the senses. What the symposium illustrated is that the question of desires in the Byzantine world is significant, and that such desires can offer insights into Byzantine conceptions of their own world.
Author: Liz James
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Sex
Languages : en
Pages : 220
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Book Description
Author: Roland Betancourt
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691210888
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
A fascinating history of marginalized identities in the medieval world While the term “intersectionality” was coined in 1989, the existence of marginalized identities extends back over millennia. Byzantine Intersectionality reveals the fascinating, little-examined conversations in medieval thought and visual culture around sexual and reproductive consent, bullying and slut-shaming, homosocial and homoerotic relationships, trans and nonbinary gender identities, and the depiction of racialized minorities. Roland Betancourt explores these issues in the context of the Byzantine Empire, using sources from late antiquity and early Christianity up to the early modern period. Highlighting nuanced and strikingly modern approaches by medieval writers, philosophers, theologians, and doctors, Betancourt offers a new history of gender, sexuality, and race. Betancourt weaves together art, literature, and an impressive array of texts to investigate depictions of sexual consent in images of the Virgin Mary, tactics of sexual shaming in the story of Empress Theodora, narratives of transgender monks, portrayals of same-gender desire in images of the Doubting Thomas, and stereotypes of gender and ethnicity in representations of the Ethiopian Eunuch. He also gathers evidence from medical manuals detailing everything from surgical practices for late terminations of pregnancy to save a mother’s life to a host of procedures used to affirm a person’s gender. Showing how understandings of gender, sexuality, and race have long been enmeshed, Byzantine Intersectionality offers a groundbreaking look at the culture of the medieval world.
Author: Mati Meyer
Publisher: Pindar Press
ISBN: 1915837227
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 571
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Book Description
Recent discussions on Byzantine art have been dominated by the question of representing realia. Among these, however, the way works of art reflect the daily life of women have not received much space or attention. The present book studies various images representing women's status and her performative tasks, and their significance from the fourth century to the fall of the Empire, through analysis of archaeological evidence and works of art. It addresses a wide range of questions, some pertaining both to pictorial traditions and to their late antique antecedents, others peculiar to changing and evolving Byzantine culture and mentality. The first chapter deals with the imagery of childbearing, starting with conception and concluding with the care given to the new born and the mother. The second chapter investigates motherhood imagery (breastfeeding, child care, and child-mother intimacy) and the portrayal of women as caretakers and managers of the household (preparing food, bringing water, carding and weaving, or working side by side with their husbands). The third chapter is dedicated to representations of women holding positions outside the house: midwives, maidservants, wet nurses, and mourners. Images of women engaged in disreputable occupations-dancers, musicians, prostitutes and courtesans - complete this chapter. The fourth chapter discusses images of women portrayed in the metaphorical margins - looking out from the gynaikon (the women's apartments), or at their private toilette; it also deals with representations of women who stray from the societal mainstream - concubines; adulteresses, women consenting to sexual acts or being coerced into them - considered symbolically as belonging to the margins of society. The book concludes with a discussion of the degree to which the visual material reliably reflects reality and changing attitudes toward women between Late Antiquity and late Byzantium; and further, to what extent it reveals embedded perceptions and conceptions of women, constructed by canonic regulations and imperial law, popular beliefs and accepted customs. The book aims to lift a veil from known and less known works of art and to present the rarely described picture of the daily life of women in Byzantine art over a very wide chronological span of time, in an effort to expand our knowledge of women in Byzantium and their realia.
Author: Shaun Tougher
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135235716
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
The existence of eunuchs was one of the defining features of the Byzantine Empire. Covering the whole span of the history of the empire, from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries AD, Shaun Tougher presents a comprehensive survey of the history and roles of eunuchs, making use of extensive comparative material, such as from China, Persia and the Ottoman Empire, as well as about castrato singers of the eighteenth century of Enlightenment Europe, and self-castrating religious devotees such as the Galli of ancient Rome, early Christians, the Skoptsy of Russia and the Hijras of India. The various roles played by eunuchs are examined. They are not just found as servile attendants; some were powerful political players – such as Chrysaphius who plotted to assassinate Attila the Hun – and others were prominent figures in Orthodoxy as bishops and monks. Furthermore, there is offered an analysis of how society thought about eunuchs, especially their gender identity - were they perceived as men, women, or a third sex? The broad survey of the political and social position of eunuchs in the Byzantine Empire is placed in the context of the history of the eunuch in general. An appendix listing key eunuchs of the Byzantine Empire describing their careers is included, and the text is fully illustrated.
Author: Nicholas Constas
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047404300
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 464
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Book Description
Proclus of Constantinople was an outstanding pulpit orator who established the rhetoric and rationale for the Byzantine devotion to the Mother of God. In this book, the critical editions of Proclus' most celebrated Marian sermons (Homilies 1-5) provide the point of departure for a far-reaching study of the rise of the Virgin's cult in Late Antiquity. The homilies are supported by a historical introduction to the life and work of Proclus, situating him within the larger religious culture of fifth-century Constantinople. Richly documented chapters explore the symbolism of the incarnation and virgin birth, including the notion of virginal "conception through hearing," and the image of Mary's womb as a textile loom wich weaves a veil of flesh the bodiless divinity.
Author: Matthew R. Crawford
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198802609
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 393
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Book Description
One of the books most central to late-antique religious life was the four-gospel codex, containing the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. A common feature in such manuscripts was a marginal cross-referencing system known as the Canon Tables. This reading aid was invented in the early fourth century by Eusebius of Caesarea and represented a milestone achievement both in the history of the book and in the scholarly study of the fourfold gospel. In this work, Matthew R. Crawford provides the first book-length treatment of the origins and use of the Canon Tables apparatus in any language. Part one begins by defining the Canon Tables as a paratextual device that orders the textual content of the fourfold gospel. It then considers the relation of the system to the prior work of Ammonius of Alexandria and the hermeneutical implications of reading a four-gospel codex equipped with the marginal apparatus. Part two transitions to the reception of the paratext in subsequent centuries by highlighting four case studies from different cultural and theological traditions, from Augustine of Hippo, who used the Canon Tables to develop the first ever theory of gospel composition, to a Syriac translator in the fifth century, to later monastic scholars in Ireland between the seventh and ninth centuries. Finally, from the eighth century onwards, Armenian commentators used the artistic adornment of the Canon Tables as a basis for contemplative meditation. These four case studies represent four different modes of using the Canon Tables as a paratext and illustrate the potential inherent in the Eusebian apparatus for engaging with the fourfold gospel in a variety of ways, from the philological to the theological to the visual.
Author: Christian Rollinger
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1835532470
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 223
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Book Description
Empresses-in-Waiting comprises case studies of late antique empresses, female members of imperial dynasties, and female members of the highest nobility of the late Roman empire, ranging from the fourth to the seventh centuries AD. Situated in the context of the broader developments of scholarship on late antique and byzantine empresses, this volume explores the political agency, religious authority, and influence of imperial and near-imperial women within the Late Roman imperial court, which is understood as a complex spatial, social, and cultural system, the centre of patronage networks, and an arena for elite competition. The studies explore female performance and representation in literary and visual media as well as in court ceremonial, and discuss the opportunities and constraints of female power within a male dominated court environment and the broader realms of imperial activity. By focusing on imperial women, the volume not only addresses questions of gendered rhetoric and agency but throws into relief general dynamics in the exercise of imperial power during a period in which the classical Mediterranean world at large, as well as the Roman monarchy, underwent crucial transformations.
Author: Elizabeth Jeffreys
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199252467
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1053
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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies presents discussions by leading experts on all significant aspects of this diverse and fast-growing field. Byzantine Studies deals with the history and culture of the Byzantine Empire, the eastern half of the Late Roman Empire, from the fourth to the fourteenth century. Its centre was the city formerly known as Byzantium, refounded as Constantinople in 324 CE, the present-day Istanbul. Under its emperors, patriarchs, and all-pervasive bureaucracy Byzantium developed a distinctive society: Greek in language, Roman in legal system, and Christian in religion. Byzantium's impact in the European Middle Ages is hard to over-estimate, as a bulwark against invaders, as a meeting-point for trade from Asia and the Mediterranean, as a guardian of the classical literary and artistic heritage, and as a creator of its own magnificent artistic style.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900442461X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 543
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Book Description
A Companion to Byzantine Epistolography offers the first comprehensive introduction and scholarly guide to the cultural practice and literary genre of letter-writing in the Byzantine Empire.
