Download PDF | Markéta Kulhánková (editor), Przemyslaw Marciniak (editor) - Byzantium in the Popular Imagination_ The Modern Reception of the Byzantine Empire (New Directions in Byzantine Studies)-I.B. Tauris (2023).
297 Pages
Contributors:
Panagiotis Agapitos is currently Gutenberg Research Fellow of Byzantine Studies at the University Mainz, having worked for twenty-five years at the University of Cyprus as Professor in the Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies. His research interests focus on Byzantine literature, narratology, theory and practice of rhetoric, genre studies and cultural history. He has published over eighty papers on these topics, while his most recent book is a translation into English of the Tale of Livistros and Rodamne (2021), a Byzantine love romance of the thirteenth century. He is currently writing a narrative history of Byzantine literature.
Buket Kitapçı Bayrı’s research interests are late Byzantine and early Ottoman social and cultural history, hagiography, medieval epics, identity, spatial studies, foundation stories of medieval cities, food history, perception of Byzantium in modern Turkish popular culture and Byzantine studies in Turkey. Her most recent monograph is Warriors, Martyrs, and Dervishes. Moving Frontiers, Shifting Identities in the Land of Rome (13th–15th Centuries) (2020).
Konstantinos Chryssogelos is Assistant Professor at the University of Patras (Department of Philology) in the Division of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies. His research interests include Byzantine and post-Byzantine literature (fourth–eighteenth century) and the reception of the Byzantine past in modern Greece (nineteenth– twenty-first century). His most recent book is the critical edition of Constantine Manasses’s Hodoiporikon (2017).
Lilia Diamantopoulou is Professor for Modern Greek Studies at LudwigMaximilians-University in the Department of Cultural Studies. Her research focuses on intermediality in modern Greek literature, visual poetry and comics and the practices of forgery and mystification in modern Greece. She is currently researching Greek migration in Germany and Black History in Greece.
Marco Fasolio is Lecturer in Latin Palaeography and Postdoctoral Fellow in Byzantine history at the University of Eastern Piedmont. His main research interests are within the field of Byzantine studies, with special focus on the relationships between Byzantium and northwestern Italy, Byzantine aristocracy, Byzantine splinter-states after the Fourth Crusade and Byzantine political ideology. He has published extensively on these topics and his first monograph, Ai margini dell’Impero. Potere e aristocrazia a Trebisonda e in Epiro da Basilio II alla quarta crociata (2022), deals with power and aristocracy in Trebizond and Epirus between Basil II and the Fourth Crusade
Ivan Foletti is Full Professor at the Masaryk University. His research focuses on the history of art history and of Byzantine studies, the late antique and medieval art around the Mediterranean and in the south Caucasus. He uses social and anthropological approaches to explore the impact of migrations and pilgrimage on visual cultures. He is the Head of the Centre for Early Medieval Studies at the Masaryk University and editor-in-chief of the scholarly journal Convivium. His most recent monograph is Objects, Relics, and Migrants: The Basilica of Sant’Ambrogio in Milan and the Cult of its Saints (386–972) (2020).
Fani Gargova is Postdoctoral Researcher for the interdisciplinary project ‘SynagogenGedenkbuch Hessen’ at the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Assistant in Art History at the University of Vienna, Byzantine Research Associate at the Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives of Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University, and project coordinator of the Digitales Forschungsarchiv Byzanz (DiFaB) at the University of Vienna. Her research interests include synagogue architecture and Jewish spaces, architectural Byzantinisms, medievalisms and orientalisms, as well as the historiography of Byzantine art history
Olof Heilo is Director of the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul. He earned his PhD at the Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies in Vienna in 2010 and later taught history at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies in Lund. In his research, he focuses on political narratives and the historical reception of empires in a wide sense, with particular attention given to the Eastern Christian and Islamic worlds. Together with Johanna Chovanec, he has edited the volume Narrated Empires (2021).
Matthew Kinloch is Research Fellow in the history of ideas at the University of Oslo. He is currently leading a comparative narratological and historiographical project, ‘Narrative Hierarchies: Minor Characters in Byzantine and Medieval History Writing’, funded by the Research Council of Norway. His principal research interests are Byzantine historiography, narratology, philosophy of history and gender/queer history.
Markéta Kulhánková works as Researcher at the Czech Academy of Sciences and Associate Professor at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. Her research focuses mainly on Byzantine narrative, both in verse and in prose, and she is currently working on the narratological commentary of the Digenis Akritas poem. She is also interested in the reception of Byzantium in modern culture and translates Byzantine and modern Greek literature into Czech. She published a monograph entitled Das gottgefällige Abenteuer. Eine narratologische Analyse der byzantinischen erbaulichen Erzählungen (2015).
Florin Leonte is Assistant Professor at the Department of Classics, Palacký University of Olomouc. Previously, he held teaching and research positions at Harvard University and Villa I Tatti, Florence. He has published articles and studies on late Byzantine rhetoric and society, epistolography, and the reception of classics. His new monograph is titled Ethos, Logos, and Perspective Studies in Late Byzantine Rhetoric (2023).
Katerina Liasi obtained her PhD from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of Open University of Cyprus. Her research interests focus on the reception of Byzantium by modern Greek literature, especially by the prose of the post-war and modern eras. Her research interests also include the developments of fictional biography, historical novel, historiographical metafiction, metahistorical novel and detective literature in Greek region.
Francesco Lovino is Research Fellow at the Università degli studi di Ferrara, Italy, where he is working on a project on Neo-Byzantine architecture in France and Italy in the nineteenth and twentieth century. He earned his PhD at the University of Padova in 2015. His research interests span from Byzantine illumination, medieval cartography and the reception of Byzantine art and imagery in the nineteenth and twentieth century.
Sofia Mali is Senior Lecturer in Contextual and Theoretical studies at the University of the Arts London. She was previously a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Theory at Buckinghamshire New University, and has also worked as a lecturer at the universities of Loughborough, Nottingham, Derby, Southampton Solent and Middlesex. Sofia is Section Editor for the Visual Culture section of the Open Cultural Studies Journal (De Gruyter). She has research and teaching interests in visual culture, art, design, fashion, curation and communication. She is also a curator and an exhibited artist with contributions to national and international art exhibitions
Przemysław Marciniak is currently Gastprofessor für Kulturgeschichte des Altertums at the Münchner Zentrum für Antike Welten at Ludwig-Maximilians-University and Professor of Byzantine Literature at the University of Silesia in Poland. His research interests focus on Byzantine humour, the reception of Byzantium and recently on historical animal studies.
Adrien Palladino is Assistant Professor at the Department of Art History, Masaryk University, Brno, at the Centre for Early Medieval Studies. His interests include the history of art history, with a focus on ‘Byzantium’, the Caucasus and ‘Romanesque’ France in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, as well as the study of late antique and early medieval material cultures, with a special interest in the interaction between objects, stories, spaces and people. His most recent book is Inventing Late Antique Reliquaries (2022).
Roman Shliakhtin is Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Research Training Group 2304, ‘Byzantium and the Euro-Mediterranean Cultures of War. Exchange, Differentiation and Reception’ at the University of Mainz. His research interests focus on Byzantine–Seljuk relations of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the history of medieval landscapes in Anatolia, perceptions of space in Byzantine rhetoric and the political history of twelfth-century Byzantium. He has published articles on the history of Byzantine-Seljuk relations of the twelfth century. He is also interested in the uses of Byzantium in Russian discourse from the fifteenth century to the present.
The reception of Byzantium, its culture and literature, is not a completely untouched phenomenon, even if considerably less popular than the reception of antiquity and the Western Middle Ages. Art and literature are undoubtedly two privileged areas of research – scholars have looked into how Eastern Empire art was imitated and how it inspired artists throughout the centuries (see, for instance, Bullen 2003) and how Byzantine motifs were recycled and used in literature (Konstantinou 1998). A recently published volume demonstrated a significant interest in Byzantine culture in pre-modern Europe (Aschenbrenner and Ranshoff 2022). Still, one area of Byzantine reception remains underrepresented – the (re)use of Byzantine motifs and inspiration in popular culture. Such a gap is, however, understandable – engaging with Byzantine reception in popular culture means exploration of a plethora of phenomena in diverse cultures and languages.
Not to mention that we deal with a constantly expanding corpus. As a result, no study of the reception of Byzantium in the modern world can be complete. In 2021, Istanbul’s Pera Museum launched a successful exhibition titled ‘“What Byzantinism is this in Istanbul!” Byzantium in popular culture.’ In the catalogue which accompanied the exhibition, scholars from across the globe discuss the presence of Byzantine motifs in cinema, metal music, video games, comics and speculative fiction. They demonstrate that Byzantium’s acceptance spans modern culture’s diverse media, and its reception has also entered popular culture. However, while the catalogue’s authors offer varying definitions of Byzantinism, their understanding of popular culture is to be extrapolated by their choice of subject, which ranges from architecture through graphic novels to education.1 Popular culture and Byzantinism are indeed two terms critical for surveying the presence of the Eastern Empire in the modern period.
However, both terms are difficult to pinpoint. Popular culture is often defined in opposition to high culture. It is a relatively recent phenomenon (Danesi 2019: 14); however, today the rigid distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ (popular) culture is less assured as concepts and ideas can travel both ways. Products of popular culture can contribute to a better understanding of a given phenomenon in the same way as (or even more efficiently than) scholarly efforts. Similarly, academic and non-academic perceptions of Byzantium are two intersecting areas. Charles Diehl previously noted this, remarking that people such as Victorien Sardou, Sarah Bernhardt and Jules Massenet (the author of the opera Esclaramonde) did more for Byzantium than many academic books (Diehl 1900: 11–12). However, this volume more cautiously opts for a different, perhaps even fuzzier term, ‘popular imagination’. This is an elusive concept that scholars have only recently conceptualized. Sven-Erik Klinkmann argues that ‘a marking of imagination as popular imagination should be seen as a special, more limited kind of imagination; an imagination that resonates with an ambivalent Other, embedded both in cultural history and in the mass media of today’ (2002: 60). Moreover, some researchers sharply contrast ‘historical reality’ and ‘popular imagination’ (Cufurovic 2018).
It seems, however, that popular imagination could function as a collective mirror for an image of a particular event, historical period or geographical location, which is, to some extent, based on historical facts. Simultaneously it is culturally ‘processed’ (explained) and anchored in the contemporary reality of potential or implied receivers, a phenomenon ‘popular’ or influential enough to trigger a response in the broader public. This could include specific motifs in cinema and their presence in school textbooks, architecture and politics. Therefore, the ‘popular imagination’ concept is more encompassing than ‘popular culture’. Moreover, it seemed more fitting for the present volume since not all contributions here discuss the phenomena directly related to popular culture as such. For example, the first part of the volume surveys the presence of Byzantium and Byzantine motifs in architecture and museums. These are stories about the (re)construction of Byzantium, be it for political (Shliakhtin, Foletti and Palladino), aesthetic (Gargova) or educational purposes (Mali). These contributions also demonstrate that ‘the popular’ is rooted in various trends belonging to higher culture and scholarly endeavours, they explore how Byzantium, beginning in the nineteenth century, started playing a more prominent role in the popular imagination.
The many dangers of Byzantinism The second term, which typically appears within discussions of Byzantium reception, is Byzantinism. This is a complex concept (at least for Byzantinists) as it is viewed as simultaneously anachronistic (as the appellation ‘Byzantium’ is a retronym), ideologically charged (since it was given to the empire rather than adopted by its inhabitants) and finally, somewhat comparable to or utterly different from orientalism. The ‘n-gram-viewer’, a tool developed to trace the frequency of words in books, available through Google Books, indicates how often this term was employed in books.2
A more detailed look proves that when employed outside Byzantine studies, Byzantinism may mean virtually anything: it is used to describe the post-war political situation in the (future) communist countries; luxurious tendencies of the Sun King in France; to express the opposition to Levantinism; or listed among theocracy theism, and monarchism as a somewhat similar notion. Consequently, any attempt to find a proper definition for this term recalls the story of the city Zangle … [sic!] from the sci-fi novel A Million Adventures (1976), penned by the famous Russian writer Kir Bulychev. The committee responsible for naming the new city decided that anyone could call it as they saw fit, provided the name started with the word Zangle. Byzantinism has the same elasticity; it can take any shape and meaning depending on cultural and political circumstances. This volume deliberately uses the appellation ‘Byzantium’ despite some contributors addressing the tension created by such a name (see the chapter by Foletti and Palladino).
While academic discussions regarding the implications of using the anachronistic name of the Greek Empire might be of great importance for students of this period, they do not, at least not yet and not to a great extent, resonate in the world outside academia. Nevertheless, as foggy and artificial as it is, the notion of ‘Byzantium’ reigns supreme in the popular imagination. Because of several negative connotations associated with the term Byzantium and its cognates, including Byzantinism,3 students of Byzantium have a love-hate relationship with the latter concept. This is best summarized by Jan Olof Rosenqvist, who remarked that depending on one’s evaluation of Byzantine culture, it can be seen as positive or negative, but mostly negative (Rosenqvist 2007: 214). Consequently, there is no room for a neutral definition of the concept, like ‘Medievalism’ or ‘Neomedievalism’, which would describe the field of studies rather than the emotional approach to the discipline. Medievalism can be construed as the presentation and representation of the Middle Ages in various media and as the process of the intellectual examination of such presentations/representations (Coote 2010: 25). In 1977, Hedley Bull coined the term ‘Neomedievalism’ to describe an aspect of modern political relations. But more importantly, this concept was used – and popularized – by Umberto Eco. On the most general level, the difference between ‘Medievalism’ and ‘Neomedievalism’ is that the former ‘implies a genuine link – sometimes direct, sometimes somewhat indirect – to the Middle Ages’ while the latter ‘invokes a simulacrum of the medieval’ (Toswell 2010: 44).
The difference between these two is sometimes explained, even if not always convincingly, by the fact that ‘Neomedievalism’ involves modern media and technology. Even though scholars debate both concepts, they serve as methodological frameworks to examine the medieval presence in contemporary culture. Interestingly, there was no similar attempt to name and tackle the Byzantium phenomenon in modern/popular culture from the methodological point of view. The only chapter on Byzantium included in the volume on ‘Neomedievalism’ penned by Glenn Peers (2010: 77–113) does not even mention ‘Byzantinism’ or ‘Neobyzantinism’. Regardless of whether this was intended, such caution is understandable as it may arise from a reluctance toward the heavily loaded term ‘Byzantinism’. On the other hand, the adjective ‘Neo-Byzantine’ is used regarding the architectonic style of buildings inspired by Byzantine churches – and it is employed in precisely this sense by Gargova, Lovino and Shliakhtin in this volume. However, it can also have political undertones and can be used, for instance, to signify the revival of Byzantine or Constantinopolitan religious influences.4
This complex heritage, coupled with recent attempts to eliminate the appellation ‘Byzantium’ altogether, does not make it simple to find the Eastern Roman counterpart of ‘(Neo)medievalism’. Perhaps it is time to reset the meaning of ‘Neobyzantinism’ and start using it as a purely technical term describing the imagery of Byzantium in modern culture as broadly conceived. Like ‘Neomedievalism’, ‘Neobyzantinism’ could be construed as a representation of Byzantium in modern or digital media, as evidenced in the second part of this volume in the chapters written by Fasolio (videogames), Kitapçı Bayrı, Leonte, and Chryssogelos (cinema) and Diamantopoulou (graphic novels). The contributions included in the third part tackle a more traditional medium: literature. However, the authors often engage not so much with the presentation of Byzantium but rather, as Toswell put it, with the simulacrum, ‘a neomedievalist text is one that is presented as a copy of an absent original, a sign that no longer speaks to a semiotic’ (2010: 46). Texts discussed by Kulhánková, Kinloch, Heilo, Liasi and Marciniak demonstrate that the Byzantium image is mediated through and filtered by earlier (chronological) lenses, texts and preconceptions. They refer to a reality that is absent for most of their readership (which is why many of the novels include various authorial explanations and glossaries). Therefore, these texts might reflect the Byzantine reality, but they also build on earlier retellings and ‘versions’ of Byzantium.
There is some method to this madness Volumes which deal with developing subfields of research in complicated and sometimes controversial topics cannot promise to deliver complete cohesion. This is the case with our collection as well. We chose instead to see our volume in terms of the ‘mosaic novel’ approach. In literature, a mosaic novel is one wherein individual chapters share a setting or a set of protagonists; it might be written by many authors, depict various viewpoints and present multiple styles and stories. As Jo Walton, a fantasy and science fiction writer, remarked in the introduction to the novel China Mountain Zhang by Maureen McHugh (1999), ‘a mosaic novel builds up a picture of a world and a story obliquely, so that the whole is more than the sum of the parts’. Various chapters in this collection tell different stories of one main protagonist – Byzantium (Eastern Roman Empire) – using different methodologies, materials and definitions of Byzantinism. They are as polyphonous as using and recycling Byzantine motifs in various media.
However, they depict a fragment of a bigger story. This volume is divided into three parts which cover three important areas of interaction with Byzantine cultural heritage: art/architecture, new media (cinema, graphic novels) and literature. We have opted for a thematic rather than geographical approach, focusing on the different media types. As mentioned above, contributions from the first part demonstrate how Byzantium entered popular imagination through architecture, and how architecture can be used today to shape popular imagination and political propaganda. The chapter by Sofia Mali also tackles the presence of Byzantium in museums as perhaps the most obvious – but also not wholly unproblematic – way of creating points of contact with the Byzantine legacy.5 The second part of the volume addresses the presence of the Eastern Empire in new media: from comics to cinema to videogames. The three contributions on cinema focus on the imagery of Byzantium in cultures with different types of relationships with Byzantium: Greece, Turkey and Romania. Understandably, the image of Byzantium is shaped by past relationships and political propaganda.
Interestingly enough, the presentation of the Eastern Empire in graphic novels and videogames seems to be much less influenced by local political and social conditions (but there are always exceptions to the rule, as in the case of graphic novels published in Greece). The third part of the collection focuses on Byzantine motifs in literature. This is perhaps the most diversified part of the volume as it encompasses the chapters on British, Greek and Czech literature and a more general contribution on speculative literature. These contributions demonstrate how Byzantine elements were recycled under different socio-historical conditions and in various languages.
All the chapters in this part discuss either texts not easily accessible to a broader readership or which were once popular but today have fallen into oblivion. This volume is rounded out by the text penned by a prolific Byzantinist, Panagiotis Agapitos, who also authors detective stories set in Byzantium. He is not an isolated exception, however; Arkady Martine (the pen name for AnnaLinden Weller), the author of the Hugo award-winning novel A Memory Called Empire (2019), holds a PhD in Byzantine Studies. Her novel is, in fact, based on her research on medieval Armenia. It is also worth recalling that the great Isaac Asimov penned a history of Byzantium titled Constantinople. The Forgotten Empire (1970), wherein his vision of the Empire is undeniably positive: ‘So few westerners realized that in the centuries when Paris and London were ramshackle towns, with streets of mud and hovels of wood, there was a queen city in the East that was rich in gold, filled with works of art, bursting with gorgeous churches, busy with commerce – the wonder and the admiration of all who saw it’ (Asimov 1970: 1). This volume hopes to demonstrate the similarities and differences in Byzantium’s reception in modern culture.
These approaches build on earlier ideas and stereotypes, which can be similar for numerous cultures and languages because they originate from earlier popular texts. On the other hand, these chapters show that the imagery of Byzantium can be modified to serve various purposes, but it also evolves. Modern imagination does not feed on one singular, heavily influential text portraying Byzantine history. In pre-modern times there was a popular work by Cardinal Baronius (Annales Ecclesiastici, 1588–1607, heavily criticized by Protestants), which was later superseded by Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–89). The picture became more varied from the nineteenth century onwards, with certain texts enjoying more popularity than others. There is no single guide, no one dominant narrative anymore – works become more polyphonous because they are based on various textbooks. And finally, one cannot underestimate the increased access to translations and information afforded by the internet. As with the mosaic novel, the chapters of this volume offer a view of the reception of the Byzantium/Eastern Empire that is larger than the sum of its parts.
This volume arises from a conference that took place in Brno in 2017 and was part of the activities of the network of scholars working on the reception of Byzantium funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung (2014–18). The University of Silesia also generously supported its preparation under the programme ‘Initiative of Excellence (IDUB)’. We are also grateful to Yasmin Garcha and Rory Gormley, our editors, for their patience and help. We extend our gratitude to Chrysa Sakel and Theocharis Spyros, the creators of Byzantine Tales, for allowing us to use an image from one of their graphic novels. It is desirable to achieve some sort of cohesion while transliterating Byzantine names. However, such a cohesion was hardly possible in this volume. The contributors often use forms as they were employed by the authors whose works are referred to. We have decided that this degree of inconsistency is permissible and, what is perhaps even more important, it also shows one more aspect of the reception of Byzantium.
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