Download PDF | (Publications of the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies, 7) Robin Cormack, Elizabeth Jeffreys (eds.) - Through the Looking Glass_ Byzantium through British Eyes Papers from the Twenty-ninth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, London, March 1995.
272 Pages
Acknowledgements
The twenty-ninth Spring Symposium was held at King’s College, London, in March 1995 under the patronage of the Trustees of the British. Museum and the aegis of the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies. The symposium was helped by generous support from the Hellenic Foundation, the Leventis Foundation, the British Academy and the Bank of Cyprus, and with the hospitality of the Centre for Hellenic Studies, King’s College. The symposiarch was David Buckton (British Museum) and the organizing committee consisted of Robin Cormack (Courtauld Institute of Art), Rowena Loverance (British Museum) and Charlotte Roueché (King’s College London). The communications were organized by Kara Hattersley-Smith. The Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies is — as usual - deeply grateful to all these persons and institutions which enabled the symposium to take place. An especial debt of gratitude is owed to the Trustees of the British Museum and its Director, Dr. R. G. W. Anderson, partly for stimulus provided by the exhibition ‘Byzantium. Treasures of Byzantine Art from British Collections’ which opened concurrently with the symposium, but also for generous support given to the organisation of the symposium and to the publication of the papers. The exhibition catalogue, edited by David Buckton and published by the British Museum (1994), is a frequent reference point in the papers published here, as it was in the course of the symposium itself. The Editors would like to thank Daniel Farrell for compiling the index.
Preface
The Spring Symposium in London in 1995 explored the ways in which British scholars, travellers, novelists, architects, churchmen, gentlemen, critics came into contact with Byzantium and how they perceived what they saw. The questions were treated chronologically so that Byzantium could be treated both as a source of influence on British culture as well as an ‘idea’ which British culture constructed in different ways in different periods of history. Papers dealt with the collecting of Byzantium, and in particular with the attitudes towards Greek manuscripts exhibited by classical scholars, with the appreciation of Byzantine manuscripts in the nineteenth century and with the changing ways in which manuscripts have been taken to illuminate Byzantium. Robert Curzon, whose manuscripts form a significant section of those now in the British Library, emerged as a perceptive nineteenth-century critic of Byzantine culture.
The influence of concepts of Byzantium on British poetry and the novel were also covered; and Ruskin was included in the treatment of the literary view of Byzantium. A series of case studies looked at individual historians and Byzantinists, and particular coverage was given to Bury, Baynes, Toynbee, Dawkins, Dalton. The British view of Byzantium was contrasted with two case studies from elsewhere in Europe (France and Russia). The aim of the papers of the symposium was to document the various ways in which Byzantium entered the British imagination and formed the national consciousness of the culture and its history. It is hoped that the selection included in this volume will achieve the same result.
Introduction: Through the Looking Glass — Byzantium through British Eyes
Robin Cormack
The theme of the Symposium was an exploration of the British view of Byzantium. Amongst all else it gave the opportunity to provide a historical framework to the British Museum's major exhibition of Byzantine art, ‘Byzantium. Treasures of Byzantine Art and Culture from British Collections’.! This exhibition put on display over two hundred and fifty treasures of Byzantine art from more than thirty collections in the United Kingdom, and it showed a range of media from manuscripts to fragments of monumental mosaics, including icons from the National Collection of Icons held in the British Museum. This exhibition supplied visual materials which were treated in several of the papers and gave an extra, invaluable dimension to the whole symposium. The Director, Dr. R. G. W. Anderson gave the opening address at the symposium, and quoted the anecdote recorded in the exhibition catalogue introduction: that in 1860 Panizzi, the museum’s principal librarian in answer to the question whether there were ‘Byzantine, Oriental, Mexican and Peruvian antiquities stowed away in the basement?’ gave the reply, ‘Yes, a few of them; and, I may well add, that I do not think it any great loss they are not better placed than they are’.
The theme of the symposium was an exploration of the British view of Byzantium, and its strategy was not so much to focus on how the words ‘Byzantium’ and ‘Byzantine’ have been variously given different and revealing meanings in British writing and thinking, but what ‘Byzantium’ meant at different times to different individuals and groups. The organization of this debate was best carried out, the organizing commit-
tee decided, by treating the British viewing of the Byzantine world and all its constituent elements as a chronological continuum which could be sampled and analysed at various times (though the chronological component has not been emphasised in the papers published here). This decision meant that the approach of the symposium was more than an examination of the historiography of Byzantium, but included historical enterprises and relationships over the course of British history from the Middle Ages onwards. The copying of a Byzantine motif in medieval art was understood to be as revealing a way of defining Byzantium as any Enlightenment historian’s characterisation of the nature of Byzantine society. One outcome of the symposium was to appreciate the shifting and ambivalent attitudes of the British towards Byzantium, and to reveal the relativism that must be taken into account in the study of that culture. In this sense the symposium might be said to be a ‘post-modernist’ exploration of the meaning of Byzantium; or at least to genuflect towards the spirit of Lewis Carroll from whom our title was taken.
This final publication, regrettably delayed, but brought to completion by the editorship of Elizabeth Jeffreys, presents most of the papers given. The paper by David Womersley on ‘Gibbon and Byzantium: classical example and commercial society in the reign of Justinian I’ was not intended for publication here, and represented just one part of his major work on editing and commenting on Edward Gibbon (1737-94).? Although The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which occupied Gibbon from its anecdotal origin in Rome as he ‘sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol’ on 15 October 1764, has been the greatest influence on the British construction of Byzantium ever since, these papers acknowledge this fact without joining the broader Gibbon industry.? For some this may suggest the criticism that this volume will be presenting Hamlet without the Prince; but the defence is that the volume sets out wider perspectives of Britain and Byzantium and in this aim too much emphasis on Gibbon and his hostile interpretation of Byzantium and Medieval Christianity would have been a distortion of the more positive side of British thinking. Nevertheless one should say the obvious, and signal Gibbon’s dominant and pessimistic influence over Byzantine history writing. Some will want to speculate that without Gibbon the story of Byzan-
tium might have assumed a different, perhaps greater, role in British education. But it would be too simple to suppose that one historian was single-handedly responsible for the British perception of the whole Byzantine world, and this volume sets out a more complex set of evidence, some from the period before Gibbon and some showing the diversity of thinking about Byzantium, despite the existence of Decline and Fall. There are, as this symposium demonstrated, many other factors other than the Enlightenment which have influenced the ways in which Britain saw the nature of this Mediterranean culture. It hopes to redress the balance, to map out some of the overlooked stages in the development of Byzantine historiography. Accordingly the paper by Averil Cameron assesses the nature of historical approaches of historians who can hardly be said to work simply in the ‘shadow’ of Gibbon.
The coverage of our subject was selective in another significant way too. The symposium was planned as an exploration of past circumstances, endeavours and attitudes by living researchers. Hence there was no paper on the work of the Hon. Sir Steven Runciman who was present as a symposiast and discussant, contributing himself both anecdotal and intellectual observations and giving the closing remarks.4 Perhaps future publications of symposia of this kind ought to include a record of discussions, as an integral part of that exercise of interpreting both past activities and present reactions. Some contributions were intended as publication for elsewhere, such as Cyril Mango, ‘The British Discovery of Constantinople: the Golden Gate reliefs’, Annabel Wharton, ‘Westminster Cathedral and the architectures of empire’, Bryony Llewellyn, ‘Fact and Fiction: western representations of Hagia Sophia’, Donald Nicol, ‘The Emperor Manuel II in London, 1400-1401’, and A. Bryer, ‘Nicander and Henry VIII’. One symposiast, Robert Nelson, has published a relevant study of the place of Byzantine art in global art history.°
The outcome of the symposium was to identify a diversity of strategies among those engaged in the study or the appropriation of Byzantium. Whether these amount to a sum national construction of Byzantium may perhaps be doubted, but the comparison with France, made by Jean-Michel Spieser, who focussed on Du Cange, documents how a political programme concerned with the idea of empire and the glorification of France did promote there a specific and different kind of historical interest in Byzantium and its relation to Rome.® The comparison with Russia, however, contributed by Olga Etinhof, demonstrated a similarity with Britain in treating Byzantium as a collector’s realm. Since the Middle Ages this too had been one pattern of British activity, but in a variety of methods, either by using Byzantine art as a source of inspiration (discussed by Barbara Zeitler) or by the more practical collection of manuscripts. The major activity of the British in collecting medieval manuscripts was given emphasis in the symposium, either as a positive quest as in the case of Robert Curzon (discussed by Robin Cormack and Zaga Gavrilovi¢) or as part of the pursuit of the Classical (documented by Pat Easterling) or bound up with ecclesiastic and diplomatic relations with the Levant (in the papers of Jonathan Harris and Colin Davey). John Lowden risked a figure for the number of Greek manuscripts in Britain: he counted 3,230, of which only about 120 contain pictorial illustrations. As for the collected Byzantine antiquities in the basement of the British Museum, these were rescued by the interest and research of O. M. Dalton, whose curatorial (and other activities) are chronicled here by C. J. S. Entwistle (who properly also quotes the Panizzi soundbite). A context was provided by the systematic paper given in the symposium (not included here) on ‘Museums and Collections of Byzantine and PostByzantine art in Greece since George Lampakis’ by Panayotis Vocotopoulos.
Collecting was, in view of the stimulus of the British Museum exhibition, a major theme of the symposium, but travel and perception of Byzantium and the viewing of Byzantium in the field was significantly investigated, as in the case of Robert Curzon’s travels and their subsequent publication and popularity with the British reading public. The nature of John Ruskin’s perceptions are covered by Michael Wheeler. British fieldwork, excavation and conservation in the Byzantine lands are covered by Haris Kalligas, Mary Whitby and David Winfield, and were the subject of a paper at the symposium by Rowena Loverance.
The literary appearance of Byzantium in poetry and novel writing was treated by David Ricks and Liz James, revealing that the culture had its influences on both high and popular writings. Here the influence of Gibbon is particularly strong - and enduring. Significantly the papers of Averil Cameron and Peter Mackridge who cover two high profile holders of inaugural chairs of Byzantine and Modern Greek studies, Arnold Toynbee, the first holder of the Koraes chair at King’s College London, and R. M. Dawkins, the first holder of the Bywater and Sotheby chair of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language and Literature at Oxford, portray maverick scholars with pronounced meth-ods of approach. They make the point that the work of both professors has remarkable echoes in current studies: Toynbee has relevance for the current explorations of global history, and Dawkins for the history of ‘mentalités’.”
The papers which follow in this volume therefore have some coherence in identifying a few of the constants in the British perception of Byzantium. But they also show the extraordinary diversity of interests and pursuits which Byzantium has stimulated. At the end of the symposium a group of symposiasts who represented practitioners of the field, one from each decade between 1920 and 1990, were questioned by Margaret Mullett as a group about the necessary tools of the subject. The consistent reply from the upper age group was emphatically to declare knowledge of Greek as the priority for research into Byzantine studies, but it was not the universal belief of the whole group. None of the papers explored how far the particular type of training in Latin and Greek in British education might have influenced Byzantine studies. The reasons for the rise and fall of Classics in British education has been recently investigated,’ but how the knowledge of Byzantine Greek (or lack of it) will influence the popularity of Byzantium in future or the character of its study is an open question. But a feature of the turn of the millennium is that the British Museum exhibition has been followed by equally popular exhibitions in New York and Germany, and that the frequency of further Byzantine displays seems sure to accelerate. These papers emphasize that the future of the subject depends on the character of its past.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق