Download PDF | Byzantine Tree Life - Christianity and the Arboreal Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan. 2021
203 Pages
New Approaches to Byzantine History and Culture publishes high-quality scholarship on all aspects of Byzantine culture and society from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries, presenting fresh approaches to key aspects of Byzantine civilization and new studies of unexplored topics to a broad academic audience. The series is a venue for both methodologically innovative work and ground-breaking studies on new topics, seeking to engage medievalists beyond the narrow confines of Byzantine studies.
The core of the series is original scholarly monographs on various aspects of Byzantine culture or society, with a particular focus on books that foster the interdisciplinarity and methodological sophistication of Byzantine studies. The series editors are interested in works that combine textual and material sources, that make exemplary use of advanced methods for the analysis of those sources, and that bring theoretical practices of other fields, such as gender theory, subaltern studies, religious studies theory, anthropology, etc. to the study of Byzantine culture and society.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book is dedicated to the “Late Ancient Religion in Central New York” collectivity, also known as LARCeNY, an extraordinary group of scholars who have nurtured our tree-thinking with their conversation and friendship. In particular, Glenn and Virginia are grateful to Rachel Carpenter, Georgia Frank, Jennifer Glancy, Kim Haines-Eitzen, Karmen MacKendrick, Patricia Cox Miller, and Matthew Westermayer, for their stimulating engagement, and also to the Central New York Humanities Corridor for a grant that allowed LARCeNY to host a symposium, “Trees and More: Ecological Thinking and the Ancient Christian Imagination” (6 April 2019). On that occasion, Thomas was our keynote speaker, and all three of us presented arboreal papers that formed the seeds for this book. Thomas is grateful too.
Glenn and Virginia thank The Clark Art Institute of Williamstown, MA, and Dean Karin Ruhlandt of the College of Arts and Sciences at Syracuse University for their support of our sabbaticals during the academic year 2020-21. When we arrived in Williamstown, we were pleased to discover two wonderful works of tree art on the Clark grounds that sparked our imaginations: Giuseppe Penone’s “Le foglie delle radici (The Leaves of the Roots),” 2011, and Kelly Akashi’s “A Device to See the World Twice,” 2020; both of these are discussed in the pages of this book. We are also grateful to the Clark Research and Academic Program and Library staff, who kept us supplied with books even during a pandemic, to Associate Curator Robert Wiesenberger’s kind consultation regarding trees in contemporary art, and to Williams College Art History MA student Elisama Llera, who did a wonderful job of tracking down images for us.
Thomas wishes to extend his gratitude to Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. A year as Fellow of Byzantine Studies in 2018-19 yielded numerous arboreal encounters in the magnificent, mysterious garden of Dumbarton Oaks. The other fellows generously shared and inspired plant thoughts as this project was in its budding phase, while Alice-Mary Talbot and Annemarie Weyl Carr both contributed to the cultivation of new arboreal ideas. Thomas’s contribution to the present volume is part of the research project, generously funded by the Swedish Research Council, titled Beyond the Garden: An Ecocritical Approach to Early Byzantine Christianity (2018-01130), which he conducts in Uppsala. He is deeply grateful to colleagues in the Greek seminar at Department of Linguistics and Philology in Uppsala, Christian Hogel, Ingela Nilsson, Antonios Pontoropoulos, Fredrik Sixtensson, Myrto Veiko, and David Westberg, for conversations and encouragements.
Virginia is grateful to Marco Formisano for inviting her to participate in the interdisciplinary round table “‘Listen. There’s something you need to hear.’ A conversation about trees, ancient and modern,” sponsored by the Ghent Institute of Classical Studies. Glenn and Thomas both enjoyed the chance to speak about dendrite saints at the conference “The Reception of Stylites: Rereadings and Recastings of Late Ancient Syrian SuperHeroes,” which took place at the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul; Thomas co-organized the conference with funding from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. Thomas would like to thank Helena Bodin for inviting him to give a presentation on trees as the Annual Lecture in Memory of Lennart Rydén in 2019. Thanks also to Andreas Nordlander, Andreas Westergren, and other church historians who participated in the seminar “Ancient Ecotheologies” in Lund.
We are of course most of all grateful to the trees that have nurtured each of us with their quiet presence, ever-changing beauty, and sustaining breath, during what has been an extraordinarily challenging year of pandemic, social crisis, and personal loss. They have inspired us, comforted us, and taught us so much, not least about the importance of connections and emergences. In a time of most difficult isolation, they brought the three of us together to share reading and writing, conversation and companionship, mournfulness and hope. That was a great gift indeed.
And yet we are also aware not only of the privilege that marks our very access to treed spaces but also of the histories of colonialism, racism, and genocide complicit in that privilege. Virginia and Glenn live and work in Syracuse, New York, on the ancestral lands of the Onondaga Nation, where Lake Onondaga and its forested environs, sacred to the Onondaga Nation and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, were first taken illegally from the Nation by European settlers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and then severely polluted in the twentieth.
We are aware too that in our own moment, in both Europe and North America, exclusive claims to the cultural artifacts of antiquity and the Middle Ages, including their ecological insights and practices, have been made on behalf of specific racial, ethnic, and religious groups. This book on Byzantine tree life should by no means be understood to collude even indirectly with the identity politics of a racist or ethnocentric environmentalism. Ecological thought, whatever its origins or forms, is necessarily radically inclusive. No doubt our work has many limitations and blind spots, but our intention is to render Byzantine Christian thought, literature, and art as capacious and generous as possible.
We should all be able to breathe freely with the trees. We should all be able to breathe.
Praise for Byzantine Tree Life
“Byzantine thought comes to life in this fabulous book. The authors’ lively writing style and astounding erudition brush away the dust of centuries, revitalizing the texts and images from what they call the ‘long Byzantium.’ And the lives that come to light here are not only human. With care and precision, Arentzen, Burrus, and Peers enable trees to come to the fore as the agents of intellectual, aesthetic, and religious history in their own right.”
—Michael Marder, University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain
“The quest in this three-faceted book is to give voice to the postmodern tree and its cult, while also discovering and enunciating its Byzantine equivalent. Our awe of the tree, majestic, romanticized, and endangered, is so steeped in the threats of our own era that it claims overweening urgency over every other, yet we know that the premodern era preceded many factors of denaturalization that we are now combatting. That is the book’s challenge.”
—Annemarie Weyl Carr, Professor Emerita, Southern Methodist University, USA
“This is a remarkable book that should be of great interest to many scholars and theologians, not only Byzantinists, as it ranges chronologically from the Minoans in the second millennium BC to philosophers at the beginning of the third millennium AD. The entire book propels one into ideas of human-arboreal relations that one had never before contemplated: no reader will turn the last page unchanged in attitude to the natural world.”
—A. R. Littlewood, Professor Emeritus, University of Western Ontario, Canada
“An intriguing, innovative and sympathetic approach to the role of trees—as symbol, metaphor and perceived reality—in late antique and Byzantine Christian thought, this volume turns over a new leaf to tap into a powerful and exciting new current in cultural- and literary-historical research. No longer is the ‘natural’ environment—whether floral or faunal—to be taken at face value.”
—John Haldon, Professor Emeritus, Princeton University, USA
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