Download PDF | Mirela Ivanova, Hugh Jeffery (eds.) - Transmitting and Circulating the Late Antique and Byzantine Worlds-Brill (2020).
316 Pages
Acknowledgments
This volume emerged from a conference held in Oxford in February 2017 under the title Transmitting and Circulating the Late Antique and Byzantine Worlds. We would like to thank the contributors for their commitment and professionalism, and to all those who assisted with, attended, or took part in the conference for creating an environment conducive to intellectual discourse and debate. We are also grateful to the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research, and Oxford Centre for Late Antiquity and the History Faculty at Oxford for their financial support in the organization of the conference.
For their contributions to the initial process of selection and peer review, we cannot thank enough: Philip Booth, Averil Cameron, Peter Frankopan, Vera von Falkenhausen Catherine Holmes, James Howard-Johnston, Ine Jacobs, Elizabeth Jeffreys, Michael Jeffreys, Marc Lauxtermann, Sean Leatherbury, Moujan Matin, Theo Van Lint, Jonathan Shepard, Arietta Papaconstantinou, Joshua Thomas, Ida Toth and Edward Zychowicz-Coghill. In addition, we are extremely grateful to the two anonymous reviewers at BRILL for their helpful suggestions, and to Kate Hammond and Marcella Mulder at BRILL for their help and resourcefulness throughout the process. The late Mark Whittow also dedicated his time both to the conference and peer-reviewing process, and this volume is a testament to his enthusiasm and efforts in creating and maintaining a thriving community of Late Antique and Byzantine studies at Oxford.
The Editors Oxford, June 2019
Contributors
Jovana Andelkovié is a PhD candidate in Hellenic Studies at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, where she holds a Graduate Fellowship from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre for Hellenic Studies. She graduated from the University of Belgrade, with a BA and an MA degree. Her research concerns Byzantine literature, the history of reading, and the social history of the uth century with a particular focus on the works of John Mauropous.
Peter Bara works as a researcher at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences on editing Cerbanus’ Latin translation of Maximos Confessor’s Chapters on Charity. He read Latin, Classical Greek and History at the University of Szeged and holds an MA in Medieval Studies from the Central European University. Currently, he is about to defend his PhD thesis at the University of Szeged regarding the lateeleventh century Komnenian pseudo-iconoclasm.
Mathew Barber is a PhD Candidate at the department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies in the University of Edinburgh, and Research Associate at the Aga Khan University, London. His research concerns the Egyptian historiography of the Fatimids until the late Mamluk period (c.1500).
Julia Burdajewicz
is a teaching assistant at the Faculty of Conservation and Restoration of Works of Art of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. She received her MA in Conservation and Restoration of Works of Art from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 2010. She did a one-year graduate internship at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, CA (2010-2011) and two years of Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship for Advanced Studies in Paintings Conservation at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (201-2013). She received her PhD in 2019 from the Faculty of History of the University of Warsaw for a dissertation devoted to the iconographic, stylistic and archaeometric study of the wall paintings discovered on a Late Antique site of Jiyeh in Lebanon.
Adele Curness is a doctoral candidate in Byzantine History at St John’s College, Oxford, where she holds the A.G. Leventis Scholarship in Byzantine Studies. Her research, supervised by Professor Chris Wickham and Dr Catherine Holmes, focuses on Italo-Greek hagiography and its relevance to the wider cross-cultural history of the medieval Mediterranean.
Carl Dixon recently completed his PhD thesis, entitled “Polemics and Persecution: East Romans and Paulicians c.780-880”, at the University of Nottingham. The thesis, funded by the Midlands 3 Cities AnRc Doctoral Training Partnership, reappraises the Greek sources which document the Paulicians and places the heresy within the socio-religious context of the borderlands of the East Roman Empire.
Mirela Ivanova is Junior Research Fellow in Medieval History at University College, Oxford. She was previously an AHRC-Lady Dervorguilla doctoral candidate in History at Balliol College, Oxford. Her thesis, supervised by Dr Jonathan Shepard and Dr Catherine Holmes explores how writing was conceived, invented, contested and justified in early medieval Slavonic texts.
Hugh Jeffery is a Career Development Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. He was formerly the anRc-Shuffrey doctoral candidate in Classical Archaeology at Lincoln College, Oxford, and a pre-doctoral fellow at the Research Centre for Anatolian Civilisations (RCAC/ANAMED), Istanbul. His thesis, under the supervision of Dr Ine Jacobs, focused on the medieval settlement at Aphrodisias in Karia.
Anna Kelley
is a Junior Research Fellow in Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington, DC after completing a year as a Scouloudi Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. She completed her PhD at the Centre of Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham, jointly supervised by Professor Leslie Brubaker and Dr Gareth Sears, looking at early distribution and consumption patterns of cotton throughout the Mediterranean and Red Sea hinterlands.
Alex MacFarlane is a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford, working on a thesis titled “Alexander Re-Mapped: Geography and Identity in the Alexander Romance in Armenia”. This follows a MSt in Classical Armenian Studies (University of Oxford) and a MA in Ancient History (King’s College London). She also works as a cataloguer at the British Library.
Matteo G. Randazzo
is conducting a PhD in Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh, with a research into Sicily and Crete in the period between Byzantium and the dar al-Islam (8th-1oth c.). His main field of expertise is the study of pottery and other material evidence, to interpret socioeconomic activities, everyday life, and settlement patterns. He has participated in conferences, archaeological campaigns, and archive studies across Sicily and the Aegean, collaborating with the Universities of Edinburgh, Newcastle, Oslo, Cadiz, ‘Sapienza’ of Rome, and ‘Kore’ of Enna, and with the British School at Athens and other prestigious institutions in Italy, Greece, Spain, and the UK.
Katinka Sewing is a Research Assistant, lecturer and PhD candidate at Heidelberg University, Institute of Byzantine Archaeology and Art History. She was previously a lecturer at the University of Minster and a Scholarship holder at the Research Centre for Anatolian Civilisations (RCAC/ANAMED) of the Kog University Istanbul.
Grace Stafford
is a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford. Her master’s research examined literary and archaeological evidence for early Christian female pilgrimage in Late Antiquity, demonstrating the interconnected relationship women had with the shrines of Saint Menas, Saint Simeon the Elder, and Saint Thecla, and arguing that many women had greater freedom to travel than is often recognized. Her current doctoral work analyses what the depiction of women in late-antique visual culture can tell us about gender and the role of women in society.
Introduction
Mirela Ivanova and Hugh Jeffery
A Byzanze, la liberté n’est nulle part, le reglement partout. La cité socialiste se trouve ici réalisée, avant Karl Marx, avant Lénine.!
In Byzantium liberty was nowhere to be found, and regulation was pervasive. Here the socialist city was brought into being before Karl Marx, before Lenin.
René Guerdan, author of the 1954 Vie, Grandeurs et Miséres de Byzance from which this quote is extracted, was no great socialist theoretician. Nevertheless, this image of Byzantium, rigid and oppressive, is representative of much twentieth-century scholarship and public opinion. The caricature did not only find expression in analyses of economic history. Orthodox Christianity and the apparent formality of its attendant aesthetics have often served as rhetorical foil against which historians could define the theology and art of the Latin West, most notably according to the art historical paradigms established in the sixteenth century by Giorgio Vasari.”
Byzantium as a static, ossified system: over the course of the past two decades this old daemon has been subject to sustained exorcism. The medieval Eastern Roman Empire that has emerged in its place appears evermore dynamic, fluid and, perhaps more controversially, globalised. This transformation has been wrought by numerous scholars and collaborative projects. Not least among these is Averil Cameron’s 2014 historiographical essay and call-to-arms Byzantine Matters, already a seminal text for younger scholars. Cameron demanded the full re-integration of Byzantium into wider histories of Europe and the Near East. Meanwhile, the Wittgenstein-Prize research project Moving Byzantium: Mobility, Microstructures and Personal Agency in Byzantium, hosted at the Vienna Academy of Sciences since 2015, challenges the caricature from within. Through a vast number of international workshops, conferences, open lectures and publications, the project has highlighted the movement of agents, goods, and ideas within and beyond the borders of the East Roman empire.4 One of the stated aims of the Moving Byzantium is to highlight “the role of Byzantium as a global culture.”5 This can be located within a broader preoccupation with “globalising” the middle ages, seen in both the 2012 ahrc research network Defining the Global Middle Ages, and in volumes such as the network’s 2018 publication, The Global Middle Ages, and the medieval chapters of The Prospect of Global History published in 2014.6 That Byzantium might be central to this movement was asserted in the title of the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies’ 2017 Spring Symposium and its forthcoming publication, Global Byzantium.7 Despite the recent ubiquity of the term, it is quite apparent that it does not as yet signify a single coherent methodology or agenda. Rather, it manifests as a promotion of a number of pre-existing approaches to historical research. Key among these are comparative history and the history of connectedness.8 The latter has made the largest mark on scholarship about the Eastern Mediterranean, whether through network studies,9 trade,10 or micro-histories of individual agents who traversed the edges of the known world.11 The 2017 conference from which this volume has sprung, entitled Transmitting and Circulating the Late Antique and Byzantine Worlds, sought to engage critically with a history of connectedness. In particular, it sought to assess whether focusing on global networks, and long-distance contact alone might not in turn lead to the marginalisation of the local and the stabilisation of the regional, and whether prioritising the history of agents or institutions which did traverse great distances might not confine us to a history of elite actors. Thus, as Catherine Holmes and Naomi Standen note in their introduction to The Global Middle Ages, we too sought to start from the local and look out, rather than start from a global narrative and look in.12 Transmission and circulation are two of the most regularly cited frameworks in which to consider contact or movement. But these terms come with their own conceptual baggage. Historians and archaeologists take transmission to imply movement from a point a to a point b, usually assuming a single bounded thing or idea.
Circulation on the other hand implies the potentiality of the eventual return of the object or idea to its original location, thus tends to deal with discrete sets of things (like numismatics, amulets, or pilgrims). All terms relating to change and to movement have the potential to reify or to destabilise their object(s) of enquiry. We hope that this volume achieves more of the latter than the former, though we acknowledge that process of historical description inevitably entails the fixing of certain categories. One of the appeals of transmission and circulation as concepts is that they speak to both historians and archaeologists, albeit with specific disciplinary nuances. We, as editors of the volume, envisaged it as a platform for interdisciplinary communication, and are pleased to present an evenly balanced set of studies between material and textual cultures. We share the belief that a category difference between text and material is impossible to maintain, and that theoretical insights should be shared and applied between fields.13
In addition, it has been our priority to offer contributions of great geographic scope. We have sought to make the so-called “margins” or “peripheries” of the Late Antique and Byzantine worlds the centres of our volume. Only two of our papers deal with Constantinople and its cultural production. Three others deal within Byzantine or at-one-time Byzantine territories. The rest seek to explore regions which the Byzantines themselves may have considered as “τα περατά”, the ends of the known world, and the beginnings of the other: the Armenian Caucasus, Islamic Egypt, North Africa, the Levant and the Iranian Plateau, and perhaps less vehemently other, Norman Sicily. The first section collects a series of case studies into the movements of people and the different kinds of evidence and circumstances which resulted in the circulation of indivduals and groups across the Eastern Mediterranean. Grace Stafford’s careful analysis of material and textual evidence on the issue of pilgrimage to Abu Mina persuasively demonstrates that female pilgrims made up a key part of the site’s clientele. It also suggests that the vibrancy of the cult-site was sustained not by elite travellers from afar, for whom we have textual records and who often form the basis of global micro-history, but by lower- to middle-class women from nearby localities, most often arriving with particular fertility-related problems.
Julia Burdajewicz’s study of travelling painters’ workshops in the late antique Levant balances a preoccupation with imperial donations, which demanded exceptional travel across the whole empire, with regionalised travelling workshops and local donors. The largely unpublished, but beautifully decorated basilica and residential complex at Porphyreon offers an excellent case study for skilled painters moving between regional urban centres such as Sidon and Tyre, or along the Levantine road, the Via Maris. Katinka Sewing introduces a new pilgrimage site at the harbour of Late Antique Ephesus. The church, with a sophisticated multi-entry system for the crypt that probably held its holy relics, was built anew amid the city harbour, most likely as a stopover for pilgrims on their way to the city. This decision, Sewing demonstrates, seems to be informed by practice elsewhere in Western Asia minor – Adrianake served as a stopover to venerate Saint Nicholas in Lycia, as Boğsak Adası may well have done for Saint Thecla in Cilicia. It was not just pilgrims who travelled across Western Asia Minor, so too did ideas about the infrastructure and organisation of pilgrimage sites. Moving westwards, Adele Curness challenges the consensus on how a medieval slave trade ought to operate through an investigation of narratives of abduction, captivity and ransom in Calabrian hagiography. The study emphasises the terror of forced dislocation, but also the procedures through which most captives could hope to return to their homelands across the Straits of Messina.
This was not a unilateral process but a complex system of violence and exchange involving actors on both sides of the religious divide. Nevertheless, it remained a decidedly local phenomenon. Our second section concerns the transmission of texts and narrative traditions. Here as above, our authors’ specific focus tends to reveal the localisation of meaning production, whether in translation, or at court. It opens with Alex MacFarlane’s analysis of mythical creatures in the Armenian version of the Alexander Romance. This text was probably translated from the Greek in the fifth century ad and circulated widely in the Armenian-speaking Caucasus. However, MacFarlane highlights the idiosyncrasies and autonomy of the regional tradition. Integral to the Armenian manuscripts are original short poems known as kafas. MacFarlane provides new translations for several of these medieval paratexts and demonstrates how they situated the bizarre creatures of the Alexander Romance within an Armenian, Christian cosmos. Jovana Anđelković discusses the use of ancient rhetorical models in Byzantine literature, offering a detailed analysis of letter 64 of Ioannes Mauropous. The letter was written to the Patriarch in Constantinople from an unhappy Mauropous, exiled to the distant see of Euchaita in north-eastern Asia Minor. She argues that the bishop inverts the rhetorical formulae of a letter of arrival as laid down by the third century bc Menander of Laodikeia.
This case study in the playful subversion of genre convention reveals both the transmission of literary traditions from the ancient world and the role of shared literary culture in uniting two Constantinopolitan men separated by political circumstance. Mathew Barber turns to a single historical event; a short military conflict between Fatimid Egypt and Byzantium state that took place in ad 1054–5 around Latakia and Antioch. Barber uses Arabic accounts of the conflict to explore Egyptian perspectives on frontier interaction and the course of high politics. Through a meticulous analysis of source traditions, he traces the transmission of narratives concerning the internal workings of eleventhcentury Byzantine politics among later medieval Egyptian intellectuals, and the limitations and possibilities offered by this closed tradition. Peter Bara’s offering is likewise an exhaustive and illuminating analysis of a brief episode in the Alexiad of Anna Komnene. The princess narrates how the Byzantine general George Palaiologos, unhorsed and about to be slain by Pechenegs at the Battle of Dristra, was rescued by the miraculous apparition of bishop Leo of Chalcedon. Bara’s analysis identifies the source of this episode as a family narrative of the Doukai dynasty. Moreover, he offers a convincing explanation as to why Anna Komnene might want to transmit such a narrative in the political context of the twelfth century court.
Part three of the volume addresses the question of contact and seeks to assess how far various spheres of the Eastern Mediterranean were or were not connected, whether that be in terms of trade networks or networks of religious believers. Matteo Randazzo’s careful study of the transfer of Byzantine ceramics from Corinth to Sicily at a time of war offers a useful destabilisation of Byzantium as an ell-encompassing entity with a coherent agenda. These unique objects, probably carried along a regional trade or travel route between Corinth and the Southern Italy, also raise the significant question of what foreign goods meant or signified to those who received them. Sicily, Randazzo notes, had no utilitarian need for Corinthian sgrafitto as it produced its own glazed tablewares. Thus, the transfer of goods does not universally occur on an axis of economic rationality but can be driven by local cultural significance.14 Moving on from a case study of contact where we may not expect it, we turn to Carl Dixon’s study of the Paulicians, seeks to refocus the study of this heretical group away from the contact which scholars often expect: namely one of heretical inheritance between Manicheans, Palucians, Bogomils and the like.
Instead, Dixon firmly situates the formation of the Paulicians in an immediate ninth-century Anatolian context focusing on the social forces that brought the category of Paulicians into existence and solidified it. Eliding the tricky category of belief or ideology, he focuses on the complex textual layers of the Didaskalie, a crucial Paulician text preserved in Peter of Sicily’s History, and the particular social concerns of its authors. Finally, Anna Kelley moves us from “contact” to a new paradigm of a plularity of contacts by challenging one of the received wisdoms of the “global economy” – that cotton came from India, in the aftermath of the spread of Islam. Kelley persuasively demonstrates that cotton cultivation was native to various parts of Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East. More persuasively still, she situates long-distance Indian cotton trade, amid and between multiple networks of regional, and trans-regional cotton trades of significance whether from North and West Africa to Egypt, or from the Iranian Plateau to the Levant.
This combinative approach makes clear that the liveliness of local trade networks neither had to replace nor be diminished by long distance, or global, trade.15 While each paper foregrounds the dynamics of a particular world-in-motion, this volume does not uncomplicatedly speak to a Global Middle Ages. Rather, the chapters collected here employ the focus of connectedness engendered by the Global turn to demonstrate that transmission and circulation are not predicated on supra-local connectivity. Thus, this volume seeks to both argue and demonstrate that liberating Byzantium from its caricature as static, isolated and inward looking need not be done on an exclusively global scale. We seek to re-vitalise the local networks that defined much of medieval experience, whilst recognising that that zones of material exchange do not necessarily overlap with each other, let alone with zones of human experience and knowledge. Recognising that the Medieval Mediterranean was not a world of fully globalised connectivity, but one of only partially overlapping spheres of transmission and circulation is at the heart of this volume. Several of our papers discuss contemporary phenomena that fall in different, perhaps unconnected worlds.
But this does not mean that these at times unconnected worlds were any less in-motion. Hence, with the title of the conference and of the ensuing volume, stressing the many worlds of the medieval east, we hope this volume will contribute to emerging histories of medieval connectedness, complicate existing commonsenses on movement of agents, objects and ideas, and showcase the work of a promising group of young scholars.
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