Download PDF | Elizabeth S. Bolman_ Scott Fitzgerald Johnson_ Jack Tannous - Worlds of Byzantium_ Religion, Culture, and Empire in the Medieval Near East-Cambridge University Press (2024).
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WORLDS OF BYZANTIUM
Worlds of Byzantium offers a new understanding of what it means to study the history and visual culture of the Byzantine Empire during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Arguing that linguistic and cultural frontiers do not always coincide with political ones, it suggests that Byzantine Studies should look not only within but also beyond the borders of the Byzantine Empire and include the history of Christian populations in the Muslim-ruled Middle East and neighboring states like Ethiopia and Armenia and integrate more closely with Judaic and Islamic Studies.
With essays by leading scholars in a wide range of fields, it offers a vision of a richly interconnected eastern Mediterranean and Near East that will be of interest to anyone who studies the premodern world. Elizabeth S. BOLMAN is Elsie B. Smith Professor in the Liberal Arts and Professor of Art History at Case Western Reserve University. She engages with the visual culture of the eastern Mediterranean in the late antique and Byzantine periods and is best known for her work in Egypt.
Scott Fitzgerald JOHNSON is Associate Professor of Classics and Letters at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of numerous studies on late antique and Byzantine history and literature and has held fellowships at Harvard University, Dumbarton Oaks, and the Library of Congress and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018.
Jack TANNOUS is Associate Professor of History and Hellenic Studies at Princeton University, where he is also Director of the Program in Hellenic Studies. His research focuses on the Greek, Syriac, and Arabic-speaking Christian communities of the Middle East in the late antique and medieval periods.
CONTRIBUTORS
Kevin T. van Bladel is Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale University. He is the author of The Arabic Hermes (Oxford University Press, 2009) and From Sasanian Mandaeans to S˙ a¯bians of the Marshes (Brill, 2017), as well as numerous articles on the history and cultures of the classical Near East.
Elizabeth S. Bolman is Elsie B. Smith Professor in the Liberal Arts and Chair of the Department of Art History and Art at Case Western Reserve University. She engages with the visual culture of the eastern Mediterranean in the late antique and Byzantine periods. She is best known for her work in Egypt, in which she has demonstrated the vitality of Christian Egyptian art and presented new understandings of the nature of artistic production in the early Byzantine and medieval periods. She edited and was the principal contributor to the award-winning Monastic Visions: Wall Paintings in the Monastery of St. Antony at the Red Sea (Yale University Press and the American Research Center in Egypt, 2002) and to The Red Monastery Church: Beauty and Asceticism in Upper Egypt (Yale University Press and the American Research Center in Egypt, 2016).
Averil Cameron has been a professor at King’s College London and the University of Oxford and is the author of many books and articles about Late Antiquity and Byzantium, including Byzantine Matters (Princeton University Press, 2014). She has written recently about Byzantium and Eurasia and about the field of Byzantine Studies.
Robin Darling Young is Ordinary Professor of Church History at the Catholic University of America. Her specialization is the history of Eastern Christianity in Late Antiquity. From Armenian she has translated Eznik of Kolb: On God against the Sects with Monica Blanchard; forthcoming are Evagrius, Letters in Armenian with Hovsep Karapetyan (CSCO, 2022), and Evagrius of Pontus: The Gnostic Trilogy (Oxford University Press; translated and annotated with Joel Kalvesmaki et al.).
Michael J. Decker is Maroulis Professor of Byzantine History and Orthodox Religion at the University of South Florida. His research focuses on the history and archaeology of Byzantium and the medieval eastern Mediterranean. Daniel Galadza is Professor of Byzantine and Eastern Christian Liturgy at the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome. He has held fellowships at Dumbarton Oaks and the Centre for Advanced Studies of the University of Regensburg, and has taught at the University of Vienna, the University of Toronto, and the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv. His research examines Byzantine liturgy from both historical and contemporary perspectives.
Włodzimierz Godlewski is an emeritus professor of archaeology from the University of Warsaw, Institute of Archeology. He has worked at numerous sites in Egypt and Sudan, and published several books and articles on the culture of the Makurian Kingdom and monastic archaeology in Egypt and Sudan. He organized the 3rd Conference of Coptic Studies in Warsaw (1984) and the 11th Conference of Nubian Studies in Warsaw (2006). George Hatke is Senior Lecturer in Ancient South Arabian Studies at the Institut für Orientalistik of the University of Vienna. In addition to teaching Ancient South Arabian languages and Gəʿəz, he teaches Syriac, Ugaritic, and Maltese. His research interests include the pre-Islamic history of Yemen, ancient and medieval Ethiopia, and comparative Semitic philology.
Cecily J. Hilsdale is Associate Professor of Medieval Art and Architecture at McGill University. She specializes in the arts of Byzantium and the wider Mediterranean world. Her research focuses on diplomacy and cultural exchange, in particular the circulation of Byzantine luxury items as diplomatic gifts as well as the related dissemination of eastern styles, techniques, iconographies, and ideologies of imperium.
Karel C. Innemée, Ph.D. (1957), was an assistant professor at the University of Leiden and at the University of Amsterdam. Currently he is Assistant Professor at the University of Warsaw and a research fellow at the University of Amsterdam and the University of Divinity in Melbourne. He is the director of the project “The Church of Deir al-Surian.”
Scott Fitzgerald Johnson is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Classics and Letters at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of numerous studies on late antique and Byzantine history and literature. His book Literary Territories: Cartographical Thinking in Late Antiquity (Oxford University Press) was published in 2016. He has held fellowships at Harvard University, Dumbarton Oaks, and the Library of Congress and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018.
Hieromonk Justin of Sinai graduated from university in 1971 and entered a Greek Orthodox monastery three years later. Tonsured as a monk in 1977, he was ordained deacon and priest the following year. He has been a member of St. Catherine’s Monastery since 1996, and was elected librarian in 2009. He helped with the renovation of the library, completed in 2017, and supported the Sinai Palimpsests Project (2011–16) and the current effort for the digital photography of Sinai manuscripts.
Eve Krakowski is Associate Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Judaic Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Female Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture (Princeton University Press, 2018).
Christina Maranci is the Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies at Harvard University. She is a specialist in medieval Armenian art and architecture, having published, most recently, an introduction to Armenian art (Oxford University Press, 2018). Maranci also works on issues of cultural heritage, with a focus on the at-risk Armenian churches and monasteries in what is now eastern Turkey.
Christian Raffensperger is the Kenneth E. Wray Chair in the Humanities at Wittenberg University. His work focuses on the interactions between eastern Europe and the rest of the medieval European world. His publications include Reimagining Europe: Kievan Rus’ in the Medieval World (Harvard University Press, 2012) and Conflict, Bargaining, and Kinship Networks in Medieval Eastern Europe (Lexington Books, 2017).
Stephen Rapp Jr. earned his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and is Professor of History at Sam Houston State University (USA). Trained broadly in Late Antiquity, his recent publications have probed the Georgian and Armenian historiographical traditions and Caucasia’s longstanding connection to the Iranian cultural world. Columba Stewart is executive director of the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library (HMML) and Professor of Theology at Saint John’s School of Theology in Collegeville, Minnesota. His research interests are early Christian asceticism, intellectual exchange between Eastern and Western Christianity, and digital preservation of endangered manuscripts.
Jack Tannous is Associate Professor of History and Hellenic Studies at Princeton University. His research focuses on the Syriac-speaking Christian communities of the Near East in the late antique and early medieval period. With Scott Johnson, he created and maintains the site Syri.ac, an online resource for Syriac Studies, originally hosted at Dumbarton Oaks and now at the University of Oklahoma.
Lucas Van Rompay (Ph.D. Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium) is professor emeritus of Duke University, where he taught Eastern Christianity. Before joining Duke he was Professor of Aramaic Language and Literature at Leiden University, the Netherlands. Most of his publications deal with Syriac language and literature.
Alicia Walker is Professor of Medieval Art and Architecture at Bryn Mawr College. Her primary fields of research include intercultural artistic and architectural transmission across medieval Afro-Eurasia (especially between Byzantium and the Islamic world) and gender issues in the art and material culture of Byzantium.
Dobrochna Zieliń ska is a faculty member in the Department of Archaeology of Egypt and Nubia at the University of Warsaw. Her research interests include immaterial and material aspects of late antique and medieval art of the eastern Mediterranean, Egypt, and especially Nubia. Between 2015 and 2020 she codirected the research and conservation project of the church in Dayr al-Surya¯n. Recently she has started an interdisciplinary project in Miseeda (Sudan).
PREFACE
This book, Worlds of Byzantium, began life as a collection of papers delivered at Dumbarton Oaks in the course of the annual Byzantine Studies Symposium on April 22–4, 2016. The symposium occurred during the 75th anniversary of Dumbarton Oaks, which was an especially celebratory occasion. As symposiarchs, wetookthe opportunity ofthat grandest of grand stages in Byzantine Studiesto pose a challenge to the field. We did so with a precedent in mind: a symposium from nearly forty years earlier entitled “East of Byzantium,” held May 9–11, 1980.
That forerunner symposium was pioneering, and it carved out space for Eastern Christian Studies to be a part of the remit of Byzantium. Our goal was to show how far that relationship has come and, indeed, how crucial late antique and medieval Eastern Christian communities – including the Jewish and Islamic communities they lived with – have now become as a collective cornerstone of the study of Byzantium. Following the symposium, we concluded, buoyed by the energetic reaction to the speakers’ fresh and compelling presentations, that our scope needed to expand, so we commissioned eight more papers to compile the twenty-chapter volume before you. These new chapters increased the chronological and geographical expanse and also brought new critical perspectives to the question.
The resulting volume thus represents a totally new conception of Worlds of Byzantium, a book which now covers the entire Byzantine Near East, from the Caucasus to Ethiopia, and spans the fourth to fourteenth centuries. The period both before and after our symposium has seen a number of related projects appear which share some of the same motivations that led to this book. One could cite several examples: the Medieval Worlds journal (2015–) from the Institute for Medieval Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften); the 2017, fiftieth annual Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies in the UK, now published as Brubaker, Darley, and Reynolds, Global Byzantium (Routledge, 2022); the 2018 symposium of the Royal Historical Society (and forthcoming volume) commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Dimitri Obolensky’s seminal book The Byzantine Commonwealth; and recent edited volumes such as Inclusion and Exclusion in Mediterranean Christianities, 400–800 (Brepols, 2019), Byzantium in Dialogue with the Mediterranean (Brill, 2019), and Minorities in Contact in the Medieval Mediterranean (Brepols, 2020). Many other subject-specific examples could be given, especially in the rapidly advancing areas of Eastern Christian research.
In other words, Worlds of Byzantium arrives at a time when the definitions of Byzantium and the medieval Mediterranean are being reconsidered from all quarters, and a more capacious view, often with an eye to bringing Eastern Christian and minority voices to bear, is gaining increasing acceptance and support. How this “big-tent” turn, so to speak, should be understood – in terms of “global history,” “commonwealth,” “Classical Near East,” “Medieval Rome,” or simply a new Byzantine Near East – is a question addressed below from many different angles. Suffice it to say for now that Worlds of Byzantiumseeksto contributeto these debates going forward and has been designed from the beginning to provide a wide view of the role the medieval Near East can and should play in new conceptions of Byzantine Studies.
The editors would like to acknowledge numerous debts in bringing this project to completion. First and foremost we would like to thank Dumbarton Oaks and its leadership – Director Jan Ziolkowski and, especially, Director of Byzantine Studies Margaret Mullett – for their unstinting support of the 2016 symposium from its planning stages to the event itself. Our 2016 Spring Symposium speakers accepted their challenge to explore new terrain with enthusiasm and created the impetus for this volume. We dedicate this book to Margaret Mullett in gratitude for her friendship and encouragement throughout the project and her key role in pushing us to explore the “Big Tent” Byzantium on display in this book. Michael Maas, interim Director of Byzantine Studies in 2016, and Sehhee Koh made sure things ran without a hitch. Deborah Brown provided key support in the library, and James Carder facilitated our access to the archives of the 1980 symposium.
Thank you to the entire Dumbarton Oaks team for their help in planting the seeds of this volume. We are also grateful to the Senior Fellows in Byzantine Studies for their support of our symposium, both in its planning stages and for their participation in the symposium itself. We would like to express our gratitude to Michael Sharp and the Syndics of Cambridge University Press for their enthusiasm for this book and their assistance in bringing it to completion. Michael has long been an advocate for Byzantine Studies and understood intuitively the new perspectives we were trying to explore. We thank Katie Idle at CUP for her diligence and expertise, not least with images and permissions. We would like to acknowledge the hard work of Aimee Caya to organize our images and help bring the final touches to the volume. Following the preparation of the index, our longtime friend and collaborator Kate Mertes passed away suddenly in November 2023.
We would like to offer our condolences to her family and also celebrate her life and inimitable talents as a scholar and indexer. We also thank Nigel Graves, Jane Burkowski, and Bhavani Vijayamani, the production team at Cambridge, who guided the volume so professionally through its final stages. This publication is made possible in part by the Barr Ferree Foundation Fund for Publications, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University.We are grateful to the Barr Ferree Foundation Fund for Publications Committee for assisting with the production costs of this book, most particularly its essential illustrations. We also wish to thank Dean Joy Ward of the College of Arts and Sciences at CWRU and the Expanding Horizons Initiative for providing funding toward the index. In addition, Betsy Bolman would like to thank Helen Evans, Sebastian Heath, Thelma Thomas, and the graduate students in my “Place and Space in Early Byzantine Visual Culture” class, taught at Temple University in the fall of 2015: Colleen Bache, Michelle Al-Ferzly, Marina Mandrikova, Rebecca McEwen, Jennifer Murphy, Megan Salazar, Lindsey Schreiber, and Shannon Stearns. They helped me tremendously in reimagining the relationships between cultural production and geography in the early Byzantine Empire, prior to the Spring Symposium. I am also very grateful to Sarah Bassett, Cecily Hilsdale, Christina Maranci, Agnieszka Szymań ska, Alicia Walker, and my coeditors for their help in improving the published version. As always, all of my work is vastly improved by critical feedback from my husband, William Lyster. Scott Johnson would like to acknowledge the generous financial support of the University of Oklahoma, its Department of Classics and Letters, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
I also offer thanks to the following individuals for their invaluable assistance in conceiving, writing, and preparing this book: Elizabeth Anderson, Averil Cameron, Daniel Galadza, Kyle Harper, Gillian Hasty, Michael Maas, Margaret Mullett, Christian Raffensperger, and Matthew Wennemann. It has been extremely rewarding to work so closely with my dear friends Betsy Bolman and Jack Tannous on this project for the last several years: the book would not have happened without their enthusiasm, intelligence, and energy for the subject. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Carol, and our children Susanna, Daniel, and Thomas for their love and encouragement in every part of life.
Jack Tannous would like to thank Scott Johnson and Betsy Bolman for all the work they did to make our symposium happen. I am particularly grateful to Scott for the rich discussions we had in our time together at Dumbarton Oaks, discussions which challenged me to think broadly about how Syriac Studies relates to Byzantine Studies. While at DO, Daniel Galadza played an important role in opening my eyes to the broader world of Eastern Christian Studies, and Margaret Mullett’s deep intellectual generosity and legendary hospitality and warmth fostered a marvelous environment for reflection, research, and collegiality. I am also grateful to Sasha Treiger for helpful comments, feedback, and suggestions on my chapter in this volume, and to Scott and Betsy for their help with the Conclusion. Finally, I am grateful, as ever, to my wife, Jeannette, and children, Eleanor and Elias, for their patience with my late nights and long hours working.
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