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Acknowledgements
We would like to express our heartfelt thanks to Riksbankens Jubileumsfond for their generous support of the conference “From the Human Body to the Universe: Spatialities of Byzantine Culture’, held at Uppsala University on May 18-21, 2017. This volume is the outcome of that conference, but it cannot be considered as the conference proceedings: some participants in the conference are not included here, while other contributions have been added. We remain grateful to all participants in the conference for their papers and their willingness to engage in discussion.
This book has been finalized within the frame of the research programme ‘Retracing Connections’ , financed by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (Mig-0430:1). Its production was supported by an additional grant from The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities, for which we would like to express our sincere thanks. We are most thankful to Uppsala University Museum (Cecilia Odman and Ragnar Hedlund) for their kind contribution of photographic material. Last but not least, we would like to thank Marcella Mulder for her constant kindness, efficiency and patience.
Notes on Contributors
Ilias Anagnostakis
is Research Director at the Institute of Historical Research/Section of Byzantine Research/National Hellenic Research Foundation Athens, IHR/NHRF. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne (1983). He is supervisor of the research program “Everyday and Social Life in Byzantium” and a member of the team of “Historical Geography of Byzantine Peloponnese, 395-1204”. His research interests include everyday and social life in Byzantium; Byzantine Greece and Peloponnese; production, consumption and use of nutrition products in Byzantium (esp. wine, olive oil and cooking); Byzantine gastronomy. He is a member of the editorial board of Oinon Istoro and a founding member of the research team “The history of Greek wine: technology and economy.”
Alexander Beihammer
is the Heiden Family Professor of Byzantine history at the University of Notre Dame. His research interests include Byzantine diplomatics, political and cultural relations between Byzantium and Islam, and Asia Minor from the Seljuk conquests to the Early Ottoman period. His most recent monograph is Byzantium and the Emergence of Muslim Turkish Anatolia, ca. 1030-120 (London—New York: Routledge, 2017). He currently works on a project on the transformation of the Smyrna region and western Asia Minor from Byzantine to Early Ottoman times.
Helena Bodin
is Professor of Literature at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University, Sweden. Her research concerns the functions of literature at the boundaries between languages, nations, arts, and media. In particular, she has studied modern literature’s engagement with the Byzantine Orthodox Christian tradition from the various perspectives of intermedial studies, cultural semiotics, and translation studies, including aspects of multilingualism.
Darlene L. Brooks Hedstrom is the Myra and Robert Kraft and Jacob Hiatt Chair in Christian Studies at Brandeis University in Classical Studies and Near Eastern and Judaic Studies. She is Senior Archaeological Consultant for the Yale Monastic Archaeology Project-North. As an archaeologist and historian, Brooks Hedstrom specializes in the material culture and archaeological history of Eastern and Byzantine Christianity. She is the award winning author of The Monastic Landscape of Late Antique Egypt: An Archaeological Reconstruction (Cambridge 2017) and editor of the forthcoming Late Antique Monasticism: An Archaeological and Historical Guide (Cambridge).
Béatrice Caseau Chevallier is Professor of Byzantine history at Sorbonne University, in Paris. She is a senior member of the Institut universitaire de France, and a member of the research lab Orient & Méditerranée. Her research interests are varied and include canon law.
Paolo Cesaretti
is Professor of Byzantine Civilization at the University of Bergamo where he also teaches Greek Literature and Roman History. His research and publications (including critical editions) mainly focus on the continuity of scholarly literature in Byzantium, on Byzantine hagiography, on the Late Antique world, and on the relationships between Byzantium and the Medieval West. Three Byzantine “narrative non-fiction” books of his have been translated into various languages.
Michael J. Decker specializes in the economic and social history and archaeology of the eastern Mediterranean of the fifth-twelfth centuries. He has been an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow (Rice University) and the recipient of a Fulbright Research Fellowship. His publications include The Byzantine Dark Ages, The Byzantine Art of War, and Life and Society in Byzantine Cappadocia (w/J. Eric Cooper). Decker is currently Maroulis Professor of Byzantine History and Orthodox Religion at the University of South Florida, where he has taught and researched since 2004.
Veronica della Dora is Professor of Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London and a Fellow of the British Academy. Her research interests and publications span historical and cultural geography, the history of cartography and Byzantine studies with a specific focus on landscape, sacred space and the geographical imagination. She is the author of Imagining Mount Athos: Visions of a Holy Place from Homer to World War 11 (University of Virginia Press, 2011), Landscape, Nature and the Sacred in Byzantium (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Mountain: Nature and Culture (Reaktion, 2016), and The Mantle of the Earth: Genealogies of a Geographical Metaphor (University of Chicago Press, 2021).
Rico Franses
has held teaching positions at Pratt Institute, the Australian National University and the American University of Beirut, where he was also Founding Director of the University Art Galleries and Collections. His publications include Donor Portraits in Byzantine Art. On the Vicissitudes of Contact between Human and Divine (Cambridge University Press, 2018); “Lacan and Byzantium. In the Beginning was the Image’, in R Betancourt and M. Taroutina (eds), Byzantium/ Modernism: Art, Cultural Heritage, and the Avant-Gardes (Brill, 2015), 31-329; and “To Not Know God. Geometrical Abstraction and Visual Theology in Islamic Art,’ in E. Baboula and L. Jessop (eds), Art and Material Culture in the Byzantine and Islamic Worlds. Essays in Honour of Erica Cruikshank Dodd (Brill, 2021), 265-85.
Sauro Gelichi is Professor of Medieval Archaeology at the University of Ca’ Foscari of Venice. He has been director of many archaeological research projects in Italy and beyond, including Tunisia, Syria, Turkey and Montenegro, and has published monographs and articles on archaeological and historical subjects. He is also principal editor of the journal Archeologia Medievale.
Adam J. Goldwyn
is Associate Professor of English at North Dakota State University. He is the author of Byzantine Ecocriticism: Women, Nature, and Power in the Medieval Greek Romance (Palgrave MacMillan: 2018), co-translator with Dimitra Kokkini of John Tztezes’ Allegories of the Iliad (Harvard University Press: 2015) and Allegories of the Odyssey (Harvard University Press: 2019) and, with Ingela Nilsson, co-editor of Reading the Late Byzantine Romance: A Handbook (Cambridge University Press: 2018).
Basema Hamarneh is Professor of Late Antique and Early Christian Archaeology, at the Department of Classical Archaeology, University of Vienna. Her research and publications focus on urban and rural settlements in the Late Antique and Early Christian periods; Christianisation of Roman Castra; archaeology and artistic expression of Late Antique, Early Christian/Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East; monastic and religious identities and hagiography applied to topographic studies. She is co-editor of the Mitteilungen zur Christlichen Archdologie, and directs an archaeological excavation in central Jordan.
Richard Hodges
is the President Emeritus of the American University of Rome. He was Professor at the Universities of East Anglia and Sheffield; Director of the British School at Rome (1988-95); Director of the Prince of Wales’s Institute of Architecture (1996-98); Director of the Institute of World Archaeology at the University of East Anglia (1996-2007); Williams Director of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology (2007-12). He joined the Butrint Foundation as its scientific director (1993-2012) to initiate new excavations and site management strategies at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Butrint (Albania). He is currently Principal Investigator of a major EU-funded project in Tuscany (2015-20).
Brad Hostetler is Assistant Professor of Art History at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. His research focuses on epigraphy and the relationship between text and image in Byzantine material culture. He has held fellowships at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Adam Izdebski is an environmental historian. He is Associate Professor at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow and the leader of the Independent Research Group “Palaeo-Science and History” at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena.
Liz James is Professor of Art History at the University of Sussex. She is interested in all things to do with Byzantine art but perhaps especially with mosaics. Her most recent publication is the very large and ridiculously expensive Mosaics in the Medieval World (Cambridge 2017).
P. Nick Kardulias is the Marian Senter Nixon Professor of Classical Civilization and Professor of Anthropology and Archaeology, Emeritus, at the College of Wooster (USA). His research interests include the analysis of stone tools as they relate to the study of agriculture and craft specialization in ancient cultures, and the use of world-systems analysis and evolutionary theory in archaeological contexts. He has directed projects in Greece, Cyprus, and the United States. Recent publications include The Ecology of Pastoralism (editor; 2015) and Lithics Past and Present: Perspectives on Chipped Stone Studies in Greece (co-editor; 2016).
Isabel Kimmelfield
is an independent researcher based in Bristol. Her research focuses on the suburbs of Constantinople and their relationship with the city centre over the early and middle Byzantine periods. She received an MA in History from Radboud University, an MLitt in Art History from the University of Glasgow, and a BA in History and English Literature from the University of Durham. Recent publications include ‘Argyropolis: A diachronic approach to the study of Constantinople’s suburbs’ in Constantinople as Centre and Crossroad, Olof Heilo and Ingela Nilsson eds. (Stockholm, 2019) and ‘Defining Constantinople’s suburb through travel and geography’, Scandinavian Journal of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies (Uppsala, 2016).
Tonia Kiousopoulou
is Professor of Byzantine History in the History and Archaeology Department, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Her research focuses on the social history during the late byzantine period. She has published the following books: O 9ecpdc ty¢ oixoyeveras otyv ‘Hretpo xatd tov 130 alwva (Athens 1990); Xpovos xa nAixtes orn BuCavewy xowwvia. H xAivaxa tw yd and ta aytodoyinc xelueva tys mens Emoyns (706-1106 at.) (Athens1997); BactAeds H Orxovopoc: ToAttix} eLovata xa SeoAoyia met tyHv AAwoy (Athens 2007, translated into English as Emperor or Manager: Power and Political Ideology in Byzantium before the Fall, Geneva 20u,, and into Serbian in 2014); Or “adpates” BuCavtivés noAets otov EMadixd Jespo (1306-1506 acvac) (Athens 2013).
Johannes Koder
is Professor emeritus of Byzantine Studies at the University of Vienna. He was Professor at the University of Mainz (1978-1985) before taking up the chair in Vienna (1985-2010). He has served as interim director of the Austrian Archaeological Institute and of the excavations in Ephesos 2007-2009. He was also the president of the Association Internationale des Etudes Byzantines (AIEB) in 2012-2016. He is a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences since 1989 and editor of Tabula Imperii Byzantini, foreign member of the Academy of Athens since 2007, and member of Academia Europaea since 2012. He is also Dr. (h.c.) at the Universities of Athens (2006), Ioannina (2011) and Thrake (2016).
Derek Krueger
is Joe Rosenthal Excellence Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is the author of numerous studies of late antique and Byzantine cultural and religious history, including Liturgical Subjects: Christian Ritual, Biblical Narrative, and the Formation of the Self in Byzantium (2014) and Writing and Holiness: The Practice of Authorship in the Early Christian East (2004). He is chair of the United States National Committee for Byzantine Studies and a Senior Fellow in Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks.
Tomasz Labuk is keenly interested in the appropriation of ancient Greek iambic and comic tradition in Byzantine literature. In his PhD thesis, “Gluttons, Drunkards, and Lechers. The Discourses of Food in 12th-Century Byzantine Literature: ancient themes and Byzantine innovations’, he analysed the re-use and appropriation of ancient Greek iambic tradition by uth and 12th century Byzantine authors, from Michael Psellos, through Nikolaos Mesarites, to Niketas Choniates.
Maria Leontsini
is Senior researcher at the Institute of Historical Research/Section of Byzantine Research/National Hellenic Research Foundation Athens, IHR/NHRF. She holds a PhD in Byzantine History from the University of Athens (2001). She is a member of the research programs “Everyday and Social Life” and “Historical Geography of Byzantine Peloponnese, 395-1204”. She is supervisor of the project “Byzantine literary sources for the history and civilization of Arabs and Arabia’. Her research interests include historical, behavioural and geographical perspectives on diet; urban/rural contexts and the environment; Byzantium and the East: Interaction, exchanges and cross-cultural communication.
Yulia Mantova
graduated from the Moscow State University’s department of Byzantine and Modern Greek philology in 2002. Her dissertation was devoted to the origin and dating of the Life of David, Symeon and George. The paper included commentary and translation into Russian which was later published. In 2016 she defended her doctoral thesis on the literary motif of travel in Mid-Byzantine hagiography and the same year joined the Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek philology at Moscow University as a lecturer. Her research interests focus on the literary aspects of hagiography, and she has recently begun work on the socio-cultural use of invective in Byzantium.
Charis Messis
holds a PhD in Byzantine Studies from Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and an habilitation from the Sorbonne University. He now teaches Byzantine literature at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, where his research interests concern Byzantine history and literature, especially the history of gender, along with other social and anthropological aspects of the Byzantine world. He is author and co-editor of several books and articles on such topics.
Konstantinos Moustakas
received his PhD in Byzantine and Ottoman studies at the University of Birmingham in 2001. Since then, he teaches Byzantine history at the University of Crete. He has published extensively on economic and demographic matters concerning the transition from late Byzantium to early Ottoman times at a localized level; on ideological and historiographical matters related with the fall of Byzantium and the advent of the Ottoman Empire; as well as on medieval Balkan history.
Margaret Mullett
is Professor emerita of Byzantine Studies at Queen’s University Belfast and Director of Byzantine Studies emerita at Dumbarton Oaks. She is now honorary Professor at the University of Edinburgh. Recent edited volumes are (with S. Harvey) Knowing Bodies, Passionate Souls: Sense Perceptions in Byzantium (2017), (with I. Nilsson and C. Messis) Storytelling in Byzantium: Narratological Approaches to Byzantine Texts and Images (2018), and (with R. Ousterhout) The Church of the Holy Apostles: a Lost Monument, a Forgotten Project, and the Presentness of the Past (2020). She is currently working on tents, on Byzantine emotion, and on the Christos Paschon. At the time of the Spatialities conference she was Visiting Professor of Byzantine Greek at Uppsala working with the narratology research group.
Ingela Nilsson is Professor of Greek and Byzantine Studies at Uppsala University. She is a specialist in Byzantine literature with a particular focus on issues of literary adaptation, often from a narratological perspective. Her most recent publications include the co-edited volumes Storytelling in Byzantium: Narratological Approaches to Byzantine Texts and Images (2018), Reading the Late Byzantine Romance: A Handbook (2019) and the monograph Writer and Occasion in Twelfth-Century Byzantium: The Authorial Voice of Constantine Manasses (2021).
Nilsson is editor of the series Studia Byzantina Upsaliensia, associate editor of Brill’s Narratological Commentaries to Ancient Texts, and editor (with David Ricks) of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies.
Robert G. Ousterhout
is Professor emeritus in the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Visualizing Community: Art, Material Culture, and Settlement in Byzantine Cappadocia, Dumbarton Oaks Studies 46 (Washington, DC, 2017); and Eastern Medieval Architecture, (Oxford University Press, 2019), as well as co-editor of Piroska and the Pantokrator, with M. Saghy (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2019); and The Holy Apostles: A Lost Monument, a Forgotten Project, and the Presentness of the Past, with M. Mullett (Dumbarton Oaks Symposia and Colloquia) (Washington, DC, 2020).
Georgios Pallis
is Assistant Professor of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Archaeology and Art at the Faculty of History and Archaeology of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. His research focuses on Byzantine sculpture and epigraphy and issues of topography. His field experience includes excavations in sites in Attica, Central Greece, and the Cyclades, where he is currently participating in the excavation of the ancient and early Christian capital of Andros. He is also member of the board of the Christian Archaeological Society at Athens and an active member of the Greek Epigraphic Society and the Greek Committee of Byzantine Studies.
Myrto Veikou is researcher at Uppsala University within the international research project Retracing Connections — Byzantine Storyworlds in Greek, Arabic, Georgian, and Old Slavonic, c. 950 — c. 1100 led by I. Nilsson (uu / Riksbankens Jubileumsfond). She specializes in Byzantine Studies through philology, archaeology and geography, taking particular interest in the investigation of the concepts of space and spatiality in Byzantine cultures. She has published on theory of settlement and a wide range of spatial studies, based on Byzantine material culture and literary texts. Her first doctoral thesis, published as ‘Byzantine Epirus, a Topography of Transformation. Settlements of the 7th-12th Centuries in Southern Epirus and Aetoloacarnania, Greece’ (Leiden 2012), addressed the history of medieval settlement as a result of interaction between physical/social space and human agency, setting forth new theory on the historicity of space. Her second doctoral thesis (forthcoming in Studia Byzantina Upsaliensia) proposes a narratological inquiry of the broader meaning of ‘spatialities’ in Byzantine texts, which focuses on the employment of a ‘spatial’ language or ‘spatial’ narrative techniques and strategies. She is also cooperation partner at the project Medieval Smyrna/Izmir: The Transformation of a City and its Hinterland from Byzantine to Ottoman Times led by A. Kiilzer (Austrian Academy of Sciences / Austrian Science Fund).
Joanita Vroom
is Professor of the Archaeology of Medieval and Early Modern Eurasia at the Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University (NL), specializing in Medieval and Post-Medieval archaeology in the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East (including the Byzantine, Islamic, Crusader and Ottoman periods). She takes a particular interest in the social-economic (production and distribution) and cultural aspects (cuisine and eating habits) of ceramics in these societies, and is series editor of the ‘Medieval and Post-Medieval Mediterranean Archaeology Series’ (MPMAS) at Brepols Publishers (Turnhout).
David Westberg is senior lecturer in Greek at Uppsala University. His previous work is mainly concemed with the rhetorical school of Gaza and the Christian reception of classical traditions.
Enrico Zanini
is Full Professor in Methodologies of Archaeological Research at the University of Siena, where he also teaches Late Antique and Byzantine Archaeology. At present he manages two archaeological fieldwork projects: the excavations in the Early Byzantine District of Gortys (Crete) (www.gortinabizantina.it), and the excavation on the Roman and Late Antique settlement of Vignale (Tuscany) (www.uominiecoseavignale.it). Recent books: D. Michaelides, Ph. Pergola, E. Zanini (eds), The Insular System of the Early Byzantine Mediterranean: Archaeology and history, Oxford 2013; P. Basso, E. Zanini (eds), Statio amoena: Sostare e vivere lungo le strade romane, Oxford 2016.
(Byzantine) Space Matters! An Introduction
Myrto Veikou and Ingela Nilsson with Liz James
The injunction to historicize space is a recent development in Byzantine studies; traditionally, philologists, archaeologists, historians, and art-historians have been tempted to take space for granted. However, within the so-called Spatial Turn, evolving in the Humanities and the Social Sciences from the 1970s onwards, research on spatial paradigms and practices has been expanding, gaining attention across disciplines and vastly different periods.! Doreen Massey and John Allen’s highly influential co-edited volume ‘Geography Matters!’ constitutes a landmark in cultural geography, because it clearly articulates the new conceptualizations of space within the context of this turn.? We paraphrase Massey’s and Allen’s title for introducing the present volume in Byzantine studies for a number of reasons.
First of all, their title performs a word-play in which ‘matters’ — used as either noun or verb — calls readers to perceive the book’s twofold meaning: in the first case (noun), as a volume that offers an outline of current issues in geography; in the second case (verb), as a volume underpinning the Spatial Turn’s main principle and central statement — geography’s critical importance for society. The present volume has been conceived as a work with a similar twofold meaning. On one hand, it aims to epitomize the current main issues around, discussions about, and approaches to space within Byzantine studies. On the other hand, it seeks to stimulate the ‘critical reassertion of space’ within Byzantine studies with the help of postmodern geography.?
In the context of postmodern geography and the Spatial Turn, space has been attributed a complex involvement in historical developments, as a comprehensive concept constituted by the integration of absolute and relative, relational and materially-sensed, physical and social, conceptualized and lived space. The investigation of historical developments with focus on spatial aspects of historical cultures initially developed to counterpoise the overemphasis on temporality, which was prevailing in historical studies until the 19708.* It gradually gained even greater importance and came under the spotlight for two reasons: first, because the spatial approaches proved to be a great means for alternative interpretations of human agencies and, second, because it offers many good opportunities for discussing crucial issues of contemporary social life, such as ecologic life-styles, natural-resources management, privateand public-space planning etc. The Spatial Turn turned out to be a paradigm shift in outlook and perspective, spanning far beyond the academic discipline of geography: it has, for example, deeply affected and largely shaped the way in which people think about contemporary politics.5
Byzantium itself provides an excellent opportunity for discussions about space. It offers an example of a medieval culture which was deeply aware of nature and very closely related to it. Its populations had a strong sense of belonging to their land, which in turn determined their personal and collective identities. These residents were very sensitive in producing their own appropriated space specifically designed to be of human-friendly scale; the translation of space to place. Accordingly, Byzantine spaces, whose abundant traces have come down to us either as material, artistic, or literary remains, constitute a remarkable kaleidoscope of late antique and medieval cultures of the Eastern Mediterranean. Moreover, this raw data of Byzantine space constantly increases, through surveys, excavations, and archival research. The analysis and interpretation of these manifold spatial vestiges open a large window towards our understanding of medieval people.
And yet, the Spatial Turn, which has been developing in many other areas of research and remains most relevant to the present day, has been somewhat overlooked in the study of Byzantine cultures. While the last decade has witnessed a decisive change in the overall attitude to theory in Byzantine studies, there is still a certain reluctance to understand, absorb, or even discuss and reject new theoretical developments.® In the case of Spatial studies, Byzantinists have been rather slow in producing a theoretically contemporary dialogue with other scholarly fields, a situation that has produced an unbalanced development of the concept of space in Byzantine studies. On the one hand, certain of its aspects (its materiality and physical transformation) have been largely investigated within the fields of historical topography and landscape archaeology, an accomplishment which deserves ample credit per se.”
On the other, its multiple involvement in social developments and cultural expressions have hardly been interpreted with using the wide range of tools provided by cultural geography. This has been more intense during the last couple of decades, as technology allows intensive documentation and thorough analyses of the physical space once belonging to the Byzantine Empire,® but all this work does not develop hand-in-hand with an equal amount of theoretical interpretations of that space as a socio-cultural component of the empire. Hence, Byzantine studies do not always display a clear focus on research ‘of space’ (Spatial studies), but rather historical research ‘with space’, having missed, partly due to conservatism, a paradigm shift in historical theory (from the Annales School to the Spatial Turn).
That said, there is a mindful and determined chain of efforts to bridge the gap between spatial analysis and spatial interpretation.® It is significant that such efforts often occurred under the direct influence from other fields of studies which are more open to theoretical reconsiderations and shifts of attention.!° The present volume aspires to be one link in this chain by offering a theoretical update of the Byzantine paradigm within the particular area of Medieval Spatial studies. An engagement of Byzantinists with a geographic mentality and approach, who are involved in the Spatial Turn, opens up entirely new ranges of possibilities for understanding the Byzantine world. Many cultural aspects speak for the crucial importance of spatialities for the Byzantines: their bodies and minds have been performed as their most personal spaces — their places — of social identity and control.
Byzantine people interacted with their natural environments in their struggle to survive and create, thus producing their spatial experiences. In that way they have constructed their own culturally appropriated spaces, producing Byzantine landscapes. These landscapes have been dominated by power relations, which divided them into territories, and they have been performed by cultural practices. Passing from the body to the mind, imaginary spaces have hosted moments of a universe of heaven and human passions. These are the spatial aspects of Byzantine cultures dealt with by each of the six sections in this volume: the space of the body; the body in its natural environment; the dialectic natural and human landscape; the territories of Byzantium; the spatial practices; the spatial imaginaries.
As a whole, the volume aspires to provide various answers to the question: How are all these Byzantine spaces relevant to us, today, and in what ways can we grasp them? To ensure diversity and pluralism, this question has been addressed by numerous scholars working in most fields of Byzantine studies: philology and literary studies, history, art history, archaeology, historical geography, historical topography, epigraphy. There has also been a conscious effort to embrace interdisciplinarity and intradisciplinarity in a more specific manner. The concept of space has been established as a platform on which many different conceptualizations and developments offer a fruitful intradisciplinary dialogue on theory and method in contemporary Byzantine studies. A wide range of different conceptualizations of space is articulated through a variety of topics and approaches in the twenty-nine chapters of this book. An afterword then offers a critical consideration of the multiple answers given to the central question by the authors of the volume, as well as to the dialogue on theory and method developed through them.
This volume is the outcome of an international conference held at Uppsala University in May 2017, but it cannot be considered as the conference proceedings. While the conference aimed to present all possible theoretical stances and bring them into dialogue, the volume has been designed as a much more focused project. The aim has been to bring forth spatiality as a crucial dimension of Byzantine culture, interrogate the various understandings of space in Byzantine culture, introduce new methodological approaches to the topic, and present case studies placed within a wider theoretical context, from all fields of Byzantine studies. Spatial experience was not merely focused upon as a scholarly tool; it was considered determinative as a connecting web of social relations.
Based on the principle that space is not simply a symbolic container of social relations but a composer of the contents happening in it, the conference in Uppsala opened in an amazing room at the Museum Gustavianum: the Anatomical Theatre of Uppsala University, built by the medical professor and amateur architect Olof Rudbeck the Elder in 1663." Rudbeck had received the idea of a cone-formed theatre inside a cupola from similar theatres in Leiden and Italy, where anatomy lessons with the help of dissections had already been established during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.” The hall’s peculiar form is based on the principle of a funnel-shaped space, a cone with the cone pointing downwards (Figure 0.1). The main focus area, the dissecting table, is found at the tip of the cone; the funnel is fitted with tiers where people stood during the dissecting lecture. The tiers are very narrow (at a 40cm distance from the parapets), so people had to stand (which had a kind of practical meaning, as they were prone to faint during dissections). The outcome of this shape is astonishing. It allows the person at the tip of the cone to look at all people at the tiers at any time, and those never know when they will be looked at. At the same time, it allows all people at the tiers to look at the person in the centre and at each other at all times — and no one ever knows when one is looked at.
A development of this architectural form was a type of institutional building, the Panopticon, designed by the English philosopher and social theorist, Jeremy Bentham, in the eighteenth century.3 The design consists of a circular structure with an ‘inspection house’ at its centre, from which the manager or staff of an Institution was able to watch the inmates stationed around the perimeter. Bentham devoted most of his efforts to developing a plan for a Panopticon prison in which all inmates might be observed by a single watchman without the inmates being able to tell whether or not they were being watched. The fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched means that all inmates must act as though they are watched at all times, effectively controlling their own behaviour constantly.'4 There is accordingly much more to this architectural plan than mere architecture. As Michel Foucault realised, “the Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen. It is an important mechanism for it automatizes and disindividualizes power.”> The Panopticon, according to Foucault, must not be understood as a dream building, but as
a generalizable model of functioning; a way of defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men. [...] It is polyvalent in its applications; it serves to reform prisoners, but also to treat patients, to instruct schoolchildren, to confine the insane, to supervise workers. [...] It is a type of location of bodies in space, of distribution of individuals in relation to one another, of hierarchical organization, of disposition of centres and channels of power, of definition of the instruments and modes of intervention of power, which can be implemented in hospitals, workshops, schools, prisons. [...] The panoptic mechanism is not simply a hinge, a point of exchange between a mechanism of power and a function; it is a way of making power relations function in a function, and of making a function function through these power relations.!6
Foucault invoked the idea of the panopticon as a metaphor for modern “disciplinary” societies and their pervasive inclination to observe and normalize. He obviously wrote inspired by his actuality but one, in fact, wonders about his knowledge of medieval texts. In Byzantine hagiography one encounters Byzantine perceptions of disciplinary spaces similar to his, as early as the uth century. As narrated in version B of the Life of St Athanasios the Athonite, the holy man constructs a monastery by intentionally giving it the shape of a ‘panopticon’:
Kai peta toito tig THY KeEMiwv amapEdpevoc oixodopic, xdxAw tadta Tic exxAnotag KATETKEDACEV EV TETPLYWVW TH TXNMATL, KEMIOV TH KEMIW TUVE-
bas, @vtivev péoov totata y exxAnoia daomép tig dpbaruds BAEmdpevos meotvto8ev.!”
And after this he began the construction of cells round about those parts of the church in the form of a square, and having connected cell to cell in the middle of these stood the church like an eye observing from every angle.!8
The visit to the Anatomical Theatre in Uppsala was intended, firstly, so as to make the participants realise, by personal experience, that spaces make people feel, think, perceive and act in specific ways, and, secondly, that this is not a modern concept. Just as the conception of such a space can be traced back to around the last century of the Byzantine Empire (with dissections in Italy beginning around 1405), the great importance of space in Byzantine culture is also very clear and deserves investigation by means of appropriate interdisciplinary methodology.
A prerequisite for a productive interdisciplinary approach is the disambiguation of terminology. This rule is often not followed. It is common for various items of vocabulary (such as space, place, landscape, environment) to be used in the study of Byzantine spaces undefined and without regard to an interdisciplinary dialogue. Sometimes they are used simply as common words without any specification; at other times they are employed as terms, yet they refer to many different theoretical traditions and disciplinary fields. ‘Landscape’ is a good example of ambiguity: it is most often used undefined in Byzantine Archaeology, yet a close reading reveals that it may refer to contradictory theoretical frameworks deriving from different academic traditions in Art History, Geography, and History-Archaeology.!9 Such neglect may create a remarkable confusion; this issue is exemplified by three case studies in this volume, by Darlene Brooks Hedstrom, Nick Kardulias, and Georgios Pallis, and it is discussed by Adam Izdebski and Michael Decker.
Because of the integral spatiality of social life (it all happens somewhere), all archaeologists — whether specializing more with landscape and architecture or with material culture — deal with space even when they do not openly acknowledge it. It is of great importance to comprehend the spatial parameter of the human past and its heritage for the present and the future, at a local level;?° this principle is here defended by Richard Hodges, Enrico Zanini, and Nick Kardulias. But how can we, as Byzantinists, approach this parameter in regard to a society and culture of the past, which is essentially remote and unknown to us? A potential measure for Byzantine spaces is the Byzantine human bodies, as archaeologically attested: by material remains of garments, accessories, pieces of furniture etc. Aspects to consider, regarding this material culture, are the size and capacity of vessels and furniture, immobility or portability of objects, their position within buildings and rooms, as well as their role in place-making and identity, for instance in the case of garments and jewellery. Such issues are discussed by Joanita Vroom in this volume.
Architecture, too, is important evidence of Byzantine spatialities. On the one hand, domestic and public spaces have been constructed as to accommodate medieval human bodies in dependence on materials from the natural environments; on the other, they constitute responses to Byzantine spatial perceptions, conceptions and imaginaries at a local and a global level. These two parameters of architecture, the physical and the conceptual, are entangled and they have developed interconnected in the course of the empire. Archaeologists have been considering a variety of aspects around the practical expressions of this development, such as location, size, scale, dimensions and analogies, building materials, accessibility and movement, light and visibility, colours, and decoration by paintings, sculptures and objects or fabrics. All these were involved in the particular spatial experiences of Byzantine people, as exemplified by the studies of Joanita Vroom and Robert Ousterhout in this volume.
Also, the body is a measure for the experience of natural space, such as the sea, the rivers, the mountains, the deserts, the islands etc. Critical issues for Byzantine culture and religion are the perception of the earth as cosmos as well as the experience of the sky as an immense, unreachable, and unpredictable, overlying space. These issues are dealt with by Veronica della Dora’s discussion of kataskope in this volume. Location is connected to spatial practices and processes of place-making as well as to collective memory and identities; these issues are discussed by Johannes Koder, Sauro Gelichi, and Liz James. Last but not least, human bodies together with the natural environment of which they are part, are the substance of the empire as a political body: humans and the land to which they belong constitute the empire's territory — political space par excellence.?! This mechanism is exemplified by four Byzantine examples in the chapters by Tonia Kioussopoulou, Konstantinos Moustakas, Ilias Anagnostakis and Maria Leontsini, and Alexander Beihammer.
But space is a crucial aspect not only of human experience and physical circumstances; it is also essential to any linguistic and artistic representation. In order for you to make sense of the text you are now reading, the space between words, lines, and sections is significant; so is the spatial setting of this piece, which without the volume it introduces would make little sense. Yet ‘natural’ or indispensable as they may be, spaces of representations are not neutral or free from ideological implications. Inspired by Yuri Lotman, perhaps the first cultural historian to approach literary space from a semiotic perspective, one could say that any artist or writer creates their own vision of the world only as a model of ‘real space’, relying on description of spatial relationships that are both factual (up vs. down) and metaphorical (up is better than down, as in social hierarchies or Heaven vs. Hell).2” Spatial representations of any kind accordingly convey much more than geographical or locational information — a setting can be symbolic rather than ‘real’, literary spatiality can subvert the basically temporal structure of a story,2* and imaginaries can transfer the reader or beholder to basically any space or storyworld.?°
In this context, spaces and spatialities of representations may be seen as reflections of experienced spaces, in the sense that it is difficult to imagine anything that cannot be grasped by human cognition — even descriptions of outer space tend to refer to spatial conceptions known to us, otherwise they would make little sense. They thus range from the innermost parts of our bodies to the universe, including its spiritual and phenomenological aspects. The contributions in this volume cover a considerable part of such considerations and thus offer a substantial advancement of a field still under development. The chapters exploring various aspect of the human body, mentioned above, are complemented by literary studies of corporeal representations by Tomek Labuk, Charis Messis, and Myrto Veikou. It may seem evident, but still worth noting, that genres under investigation here range from legal texts to poetry; there is no text type for which space is irrelevant, although the chapters of this volume express a certain leaning towards hagiography (see the chapters by Myrto Veikou, David Westberg, Paolo Cesaretti & Basema Hamarneh, and Yulia Mantova). Such a tendency is probably indicative of the increasing literary interest in hagiography rather than a lack of interest in the spatialities of other genres; while early studies of literary spatiality in Byzantium focused on novelistic and ekphrastic texts,° time has now come to a genre that brims with spatial notions on linguistic, factual, and literary levels.
Space in art and literature is sometimes seen as an indispensable but not necessarily important setting: merely the backdrop against which images or stories are placed. The aesthetic, symbolic or emotional implications of such spatial settings are then left out of the discussion, as if they had no significance for the overall interpretation of the work. To an even greater extent, the impact of the space in which works of art were placed, texts were performed or stories told is often overlooked, with the result that their spatial context is underestimated or neglected. Nonetheless, whenever Byzantinists engage with ideas around landscapes or places or architecture, be they in texts, in images or in the material world, they are engaging with spaces. Byzantine objects exist in space and spaces; are displayed in spaces; have homes in different places. How those spaces acted, with or without reference to the objects within them, is proving a fruitful source of inquiry: light and sound in Hagia Sophia; acoustics in churches in Thessaloniki.?7
Indeed, throughout Byzantine art, there are images of spaces and places, from depictions of the Cosmos or the end of time (in the form of the Last Judgement) to idyllic pastoral landscapes and gardens, spaces both real and imaginary (and sometimes both at the same time). Often these space/place
anything that cannot be grasped by human cognition — even descriptions of outer space tend to refer to spatial conceptions known to us, otherwise they would make little sense. They thus range from the innermost parts of our bodies to the universe, including its spiritual and phenomenological aspects. The contributions in this volume cover a considerable part of such considerations and thus offer a substantial advancement of a field still under development. The chapters exploring various aspect of the human body, mentioned above, are complemented by literary studies of corporeal representations by Tomek Labuk, Charis Messis, and Myrto Veikou. It may seem evident, but still worth noting, that genres under investigation here range from legal texts to poetry; there is no text type for which space is irrelevant, although the chapters of this volume express a certain leaning towards hagiography (see the chapters by Myrto Veikou, David Westberg, Paolo Cesaretti & Basema Hamarneh, and Yulia Mantova). Such a tendency is probably indicative of the increasing literary interest in hagiography rather than a lack of interest in the spatialities of other genres; while early studies of literary spatiality in Byzantium focused on novelistic and ekphrastic texts,° time has now come to a genre that brims with spatial notions on linguistic, factual, and literary levels.
Space in art and literature is sometimes seen as an indispensable but not necessarily important setting: merely the backdrop against which images or stories are placed. The aesthetic, symbolic or emotional implications of such spatial settings are then left out of the discussion, as if they had no significance for the overall interpretation of the work. To an even greater extent, the impact of the space in which works of art were placed, texts were performed or stories told is often overlooked, with the result that their spatial context is underestimated or neglected. Nonetheless, whenever Byzantinists engage with ideas around landscapes or places or architecture, be they in texts, in images or in the material world, they are engaging with spaces. Byzantine objects exist in space and spaces; are displayed in spaces; have homes in different places. How those spaces acted, with or without reference to the objects within them, is proving a fruitful source of inquiry: light and sound in Hagia Sophia; acoustics in churches in Thessaloniki.?7
Indeed, throughout Byzantine art, there are images of spaces and places, from depictions of the Cosmos or the end of time (in the form of the Last Judgement) to idyllic pastoral landscapes and gardens, spaces both real and imaginary (and sometimes both at the same time). Often these space/place aspects of the image are overlooked — little has been said about ‘landscape’ as a Byzantine pictorial concept, for example, other than to dismiss it.?® Veronica Della Dora and Helen Saradi have, in different ways, looked to explore the Byzantines’ own conceptualisations of space made visible in their images.”9 Della Dora has considered sacred topographies, both real (Mount Sinai) and depicted (images of Mount Sinai). Saradi has engaged with architecture and images of architecture — how were cities represented, for example, and why, and what changed — the differences apparent in floor mosaics such as that from the eighth-century church of St Stephen at Umm al-Rasas in Jordan to the city held by Constantine in the tenth-century mosaic of the south-west vestibule in Hagia Sophia.
So Byzantine images — pictorial as well as literary — exist in space and as spaces. They can depict spaces and places. They can turn spaces into places. Spaces in an image, on an image and around an image can all affect its reception, its effect. Images both define and help us see how the Byzantines perceived, conceived, and defined space, the world around them. Even taking space as a backdrop is to define it or to banish it. This becomes clear in the contributions of Margaret Mullett, Béatrice Caseau, Liz James, and Rico Franses, forcing us to reconsider some preconceived notions of what represented spaces actually are and what they mean. The implications and meaning of spiritual representations of spaces and places are investigated by Helena Bodin and Isabel Kimmelfield, both with a certain focus on one of the central spaces of Byzantium: Constantinople. The question about the workings of language in actual, physical space, both in the presence of made words (carved on a building, written on or into an image) within images and as words as images themselves, is addressed by Brad Hostetler. The very ordering of words was a spatial statement in itself — an ordering and management of space prevalent in Byzantine society through its visibility on buildings, objects, and in manuscripts.
We are matter, and material space includes us and surrounds us. We seek to conceive and manage it by translating it into different idioms: physical space, conceptual spaces, social space, and place. Space is a natural feature and concurrently a human construction; it lies on us to perceive, label, experience, share and divide.
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