Thomas Carlson | Oklahoma State University (original) (raw)

Papers by Thomas Carlson

Research paper thumbnail of Contours of Conversion: The Geography of Islamization in Syria, 600-1500

The Islamization of Syria, a multi-faceted social and cultural process not limited to demography,... more The Islamization of Syria, a multi-faceted social and cultural process not limited to demography, was slow and highly variable across different locales. This article analyzes geographical works—ten in Arabic, one in Persian, and one in Hebrew—as well as the earliest Ottoman defters of the province to outline the process of Islamization in Syria from the Islamic conquest in the seventh century to the Ottoman conquest in the sixteenth. Geographical texts cannot be mined as databases, but when interpreted as literature they provide often detailed information regarding the foundation of mosques, the slow conversion of multi-religious shrines, and areas within Syria known for particular religious affiliations.

Research paper thumbnail of Formulaic Prose? Rhetoric and Meaning in Late Medieval Syriac Manuscript Colophons

The most numerous genre of Syriac texts is the manuscript colophon. Colophons have long been re... more The most numerous genre of Syriac texts is the manuscript colophon. Colophons have long been regarded as essential for dating manuscript copies, itself useful for textual criticism. In the past two decades, studies by David Wilmshurst and Heleen Murre-van den Berg have shown the value of colophons for institutional and social history. This paper analyzes the literary characteristics of a corpus of primarily late medieval Eastern Syriac colophons. At the same time, the paper draws on comparative material from Armenian, Western Syriac, and Christian Arabic colophons to identify the breadth of diffusion of scribal practices.
Scholars have focused on each colophon’s unique features rather than broad commonalities, and frequently ignore “formulaic” passages. Nevertheless, not all formulas are equivalent. This paper proposes a double classification scheme of literary formulas in colophon texts, one based on degree of fixity and the other based on diffusion. Some phrases and sentences are repeated verbatim. Other colophon elements tolerate a greater degree of flexibility, allowing substitution of different words or phrases. At the unstable end of “formulas” may be included common tropes or expected sentiments which scribes typically express in the course of their composition. Scribal formulas also have diffusion patterns. Each formula has temporal and geographical dimensions of introduction, spread, and possible abandonment. Some formulas cross linguistic or confessional boundaries, while others do not.
Finally, scholars have identified prose as “formulaic” or “merely rhetorical” in order to dismiss it as meaningless. Nevertheless, scribal choices regarding which formulas to include, and which phrases to include in formulaic structures, have meaning. In contrast to the prevailing scholarly pessimism, this paper argues for, on the one hand, a cautious optimism for interpretations which take into account the conventions of the colophon genre, and on the other hand, a shift of the center of meaning from individual scribes to the community as a whole.

Research paper thumbnail of The Future of the Past: The Reception of Syriac Qaṭraye Authors in Late Medieval Iraq

Mario Kozah, Abdulrahim Abu-Husayn, Saif Shaheen al-Murikhi, and Haya Al-Thani (eds.), The Syriac Writers of Qatar in the Seventh Century, 2014

Several authors from Beth Qaṭraye are cited by Isḥaq Shbadnaya, a priest from northern Iraq in th... more Several authors from Beth Qaṭraye are cited by Isḥaq Shbadnaya, a priest from northern Iraq in the fifteenth century. Shbadnaya’s ‘Poem on God's Government from “In the Beginning” until Eternity’ is a long didactic poem, with a prose commentary consisting primarily of quotations from earlier authors. Ten citations attribute ideas and opinions to Isaac of Nineveh, to Aḥobh Qaṭraya, to Gabriel Qaṭraya, to Rabban Gabriel Qaṭraya, or to an author identified simply as ‘Qaṭraya’. A poem quoted anonymously by Shbadnaya also cites Isaac of Nineveh, raising the question how his reception of these authors was mediated. This paper presents a first edition and English translation of these quotations from Shbadnaya’s larger work, and explores the character and genre of these quotations, most of which seem to be exegetical or chronological. This is a first step toward charting the reception of the Qaṭraya corpus in later East Syriac literature and thought.

Research paper thumbnail of History and Self-Concept in the Fifteenth-Century Church of the East: The Works of Isḥāq Šbadnāyā and Īšōʿyahb bar Mqaddam

Parole de l'Orient (forthcoming)

The Church of the East in fifteenth-century Iraq may appear to modern scholars as a community wi... more The Church of the East in fifteenth-century Iraq may appear to modern scholars as a community without a past. No textual narrative of East Syrian history has survived from the fifteenth century, or for several centuries thereafter. New hagiographical poems were composed in the fifteenth century, but the saints whom they commemorated were without exception pre-Islamic. Even the succession of catholicos-patriarchs of the East only re-emerges into historians’ awareness after 1477, following almost a century of obscurity. Fifteenth-century East Syrian sources show no interest in their recent communal past, or in reconstructing the order of events in their older history.
Yet the Church of the East thought of itself as a community with a past. Although the long “Poem on the Economy of God from ‘In the Beginning’ until Eternity” by the fifteenth-century priest Isḥāq Šbadnāyā is primarily a synthesis of theology and exegesis, it also provides a tightly sequenced and dated discussion of the foundation of the Church by Jesus and the apostles, as well as unordered appeals to previous authors (late antique and medieval) as authorities in exegetical and doctrinal discussions. Šbadnāyā and his contemporary Īšōʿyahb bar Mqaddam, the Metropolitan of Erbil, also composed liturgical poetry for various occasions. These texts show that, in contrast to modern Western views of history, the fifteenth-century Church of the East regarded its recent past as less important than its ancient past.

Research paper thumbnail of Syriac Christology and Christian Community in the Fifteenth-Century Church of the East

Syriac Christology has largely been investigated from a Western European perspective to determine... more Syriac Christology has largely been investigated from a Western European perspective to determine whether it is heretical or not. Such investigations have typically focused on a small number of doctrinal formulae and the terminology of philosophical theology. My study starts from a different position, trying to understand how the Church of the East (the so-called “Nestorian Church”) understood the nature of its collective social life in the fifteenth century. Since “Christian” was their most specific primary term of identification, one would expect their self-conception to be related to their concept of Christ. Contrary to what many have expected, it seems that doctrinal distinction was not the most important factor of Christology for East Syrian self-understanding. By exploring not only the terms of abstract doctrines but also the more common liturgical and literary images of Christ in this period, this study argues that dogmatic theology is not the center of Syriac Christians’ understanding either of Christ or of themselves; rather than what they believed about Christ, they were most concerned with what they received from Christ, especially protection in this world and salvation to come. On the other hand, Christ’s roles as Lord and Savior not only of his community but of all creation, simultaneously reinforced and called into question the notion that the Church of the East could be defined by a special status as beneficiaries of Christ’s salvation. Primarily drawing from the texts for dominical feasts in a fifteenth-century Ḥūdrā manuscript (BL Add. 7177) and the Īsḥāq Shbadnāyā’s unedited masterpiece, “The Poem on God’s Economy from ‘In the Beginning’ until Eternity,” my paper presents convergences and divergences in how each source presents Christ, and how each aspect of their Christology correlates to notions of Christian community. The paper reveals a nuanced notion of what Christianity meant in the fifteenth century.

Research paper thumbnail of Review of Li Tang, East Syriac Christianity in Mongol-Yuan China

The study of Christianity in pre-modern China is a challenging field which is experiencing a surg... more The study of Christianity in pre-modern China is a challenging field which is experiencing a surge of interest. Li Tang has been in the thick of this research, from her earlier volume primarily on Christianity in the Tang period, to participating in all three conferences organized at Universität Salzburg on the theme, “Research on the Church of the East in China and Central Asia” (2003, 2006, 2009). Prof. Tang co-edited with Dietmar Winkler the volume of papers from the second conference, while the volume presently under review extensively used the proceedings of the first conference. As she remarks in the preface to the current volume, more studies have focused on Christianity in Tang China than under Mongol rule (xv), which makes the current volume all the more necessary and remarkable.

The importance of the present volume lies primarily in its presentation for the first time of portions of several Chinese-language sources in English translation...

Research paper thumbnail of A Light From “the Dark Centuries”: Isḥaq Shbadnaya's Life and Works

xa.yimg.com

Isḥaq Shbadnaya is an important if almost entirely unknown author of the Church of the East in th... more Isḥaq Shbadnaya is an important if almost entirely unknown author of the Church of the East in the fifteenth century. This article brings together the few and contradictory references to him in the secondary literature and uses manuscript evidence to adjudicate the different dates and names assigned to him. It also gathers what biographical information we can glean about him and describes his works: one major exegetical work, three liturgical ‘onyatha, and a previously unknown short poem. The article concludes by demonstrating Isḥaq Shbadnaya’s continued importance in the East Syrian community from the fifteenth into the twentieth century.

Digital Humanities Projects by Thomas Carlson

Research paper thumbnail of The Syriac Gazetteer

Dissertation by Thomas Carlson

Research paper thumbnail of Christianity in Fifteenth-Century Iraq: The Church of the East as a Conceptual Community

Mainstream historical scholarship has largely neglected the social diversity of the medieval Midd... more Mainstream historical scholarship has largely neglected the social diversity of the medieval Middle East: the vast majority of studies focus on Muslim elites, whether political or religious. Non-Muslim populations have been studied almost exclusively by specialists in the fields of Judaic, Syriac, Armenian, and Coptic studies, often neglecting other populations in the historical context, or by specialists in Islamic studies as dhimmīs from the perspective of Muslim jurists, eliding the distinct experiences of non-Muslims. Yet as late as the sixteenth century Christians were more than a third of the population in northern Iraq. This dissertation examines how one branch of medieval Middle Eastern Christianity, the Church of the East (called “Nestorian” by outsiders), understood the nature of its own community in the fifteenth century. In doing so it challenges Euro-centric studies of Christianity and Islamo-centric studies of the Middle East, and places a medieval Middle Eastern non-Muslim population in their social and cultural context.

Talks by Thomas Carlson

Research paper thumbnail of Beyond Gadgetology: Basic Concepts for Assessing the Limitations of Digital Methods

Humanities scholars are trained to critique power relationships and representations, while techno... more Humanities scholars are trained to critique power relationships and representations, while technology practitioners are trained to optimize what computers do, but who might think critically about the limitations of applying digital methods to humanities scholarship? And how might we do that? The digital world is, by default, very tidy, while the real world is very messy, so to what degree can we use digital methods to investigate the world of human phenomena? This session proposes a few basic concepts for assessing digital methods, and then discusses some common digital approaches in light of the concepts proposed.

Research paper thumbnail of Identity and Identification in the Digital Humanities: The Challenges and Experience of Syriaca.org

The growing field of digital humanities seeks to bring together research problems defined in the ... more The growing field of digital humanities seeks to bring together research problems defined in the humanities with the amazing surge of computational power developed in recent technology. The result is a constellation of new tools being developed to enable humanistic research, while grappling with the theoretical issues distinctive to the humanities which resist the tidy definition of problems and answers in terms of mathematical formulae and computational precision. One such tool is the Syriac Reference Portal (Syriaca.org), a reference website for Syriac Studies currently being developed jointly by researchers at six institutions including Vanderbilt University, Princeton University, and the Beth Mardutho Research Library. This talk will present an overview and partial demo of Syriaca.org which is collecting data about Syriac authors, saints, people mentioned in Syriac texts, and places, while enabling automatic linking of our data with existing tools such as online manuscript catalogs. The talk will consider challenges of "identity" and "identification" in relation to digitization. The problem of the identity of past persons, places, and objects (such as manuscripts) includes the question of how to represent multiple and/or ambiguous identification within the constraints of databases. The Syriac reference portal has worked to overcome these issues through collaboration between technical experts and humanities researchers, in order to develop tools useful for complex data discovery, authority control and context-independent identifiers for computational use.

Books by Thomas Carlson

Research paper thumbnail of The Visual Culture of Later Byzantium (c.1081–c.1350), parts 1 & 2.

by Foteini Spingou, Charles Barber, Nathan Leidholm, Thomas Carlson, Ivan Drpić, Alexandros (Alexander) Alexakis, elizabeth jeffreys, Theocharis Tsampouras, Mircea G . Duluș, Nikos Zagklas, Ida Toth, Alexander Riehle, Brad Hostetler, Michael Featherstone, Emmanuel C Bourbouhakis, Shannon Steiner, Efthymios Rizos, Divna Manolova, Robert Romanchuk, Maria Tomadaki, Kirsty Stewart, Baukje van den Berg, Katarzyna Warcaba, Florin Leonte, Vasileios Marinis, Ludovic Bender, Linda Safran, Sophia Kalopissi-Verti, Rachele Ricceri, Luisa Andriollo, Alex J Novikoff, Annemarie Carr, Marina Bazzani, Greti Dinkova-Bruun, Renaat Meesters, Daphne (Dafni) / Δάφνη Penna / Πέννα, Annemarie Carr, Alexander Alexakis, Jeremy Johns, Maria Parani, Lisa Mahoney, Irena Spadijer, and Ilias Taxidis

ISBN: 9781108483056 Series: Sources for Byzantine Art History 3 In this book the beauty and m... more ISBN: 9781108483056
Series: Sources for Byzantine Art History 3

In this book the beauty and meaning of Byzantine art and its aesthetics are for the first time made accessible through the original sources. More than 150 medieval texts are translated from nine medieval languages into English, with commentaries from over seventy leading scholars. These include theories of art, discussions of patronage and understandings of iconography, practical recipes for artistic supplies, expressions of devotion, and descriptions of cities. The volume reveals the cultural plurality and the interconnectivity of medieval Europe and the Mediterranean from the late eleventh to the early fourteenth centuries. The first part uncovers salient aspects of Byzantine artistic production and its aesthetic reception, while the second puts a spotlight on particular ways of expressing admiration and of interpreting of the visual.

Research paper thumbnail of Contours of Conversion: The Geography of Islamization in Syria, 600-1500

The Islamization of Syria, a multi-faceted social and cultural process not limited to demography,... more The Islamization of Syria, a multi-faceted social and cultural process not limited to demography, was slow and highly variable across different locales. This article analyzes geographical works—ten in Arabic, one in Persian, and one in Hebrew—as well as the earliest Ottoman defters of the province to outline the process of Islamization in Syria from the Islamic conquest in the seventh century to the Ottoman conquest in the sixteenth. Geographical texts cannot be mined as databases, but when interpreted as literature they provide often detailed information regarding the foundation of mosques, the slow conversion of multi-religious shrines, and areas within Syria known for particular religious affiliations.

Research paper thumbnail of Formulaic Prose? Rhetoric and Meaning in Late Medieval Syriac Manuscript Colophons

The most numerous genre of Syriac texts is the manuscript colophon. Colophons have long been re... more The most numerous genre of Syriac texts is the manuscript colophon. Colophons have long been regarded as essential for dating manuscript copies, itself useful for textual criticism. In the past two decades, studies by David Wilmshurst and Heleen Murre-van den Berg have shown the value of colophons for institutional and social history. This paper analyzes the literary characteristics of a corpus of primarily late medieval Eastern Syriac colophons. At the same time, the paper draws on comparative material from Armenian, Western Syriac, and Christian Arabic colophons to identify the breadth of diffusion of scribal practices.
Scholars have focused on each colophon’s unique features rather than broad commonalities, and frequently ignore “formulaic” passages. Nevertheless, not all formulas are equivalent. This paper proposes a double classification scheme of literary formulas in colophon texts, one based on degree of fixity and the other based on diffusion. Some phrases and sentences are repeated verbatim. Other colophon elements tolerate a greater degree of flexibility, allowing substitution of different words or phrases. At the unstable end of “formulas” may be included common tropes or expected sentiments which scribes typically express in the course of their composition. Scribal formulas also have diffusion patterns. Each formula has temporal and geographical dimensions of introduction, spread, and possible abandonment. Some formulas cross linguistic or confessional boundaries, while others do not.
Finally, scholars have identified prose as “formulaic” or “merely rhetorical” in order to dismiss it as meaningless. Nevertheless, scribal choices regarding which formulas to include, and which phrases to include in formulaic structures, have meaning. In contrast to the prevailing scholarly pessimism, this paper argues for, on the one hand, a cautious optimism for interpretations which take into account the conventions of the colophon genre, and on the other hand, a shift of the center of meaning from individual scribes to the community as a whole.

Research paper thumbnail of The Future of the Past: The Reception of Syriac Qaṭraye Authors in Late Medieval Iraq

Mario Kozah, Abdulrahim Abu-Husayn, Saif Shaheen al-Murikhi, and Haya Al-Thani (eds.), The Syriac Writers of Qatar in the Seventh Century, 2014

Several authors from Beth Qaṭraye are cited by Isḥaq Shbadnaya, a priest from northern Iraq in th... more Several authors from Beth Qaṭraye are cited by Isḥaq Shbadnaya, a priest from northern Iraq in the fifteenth century. Shbadnaya’s ‘Poem on God's Government from “In the Beginning” until Eternity’ is a long didactic poem, with a prose commentary consisting primarily of quotations from earlier authors. Ten citations attribute ideas and opinions to Isaac of Nineveh, to Aḥobh Qaṭraya, to Gabriel Qaṭraya, to Rabban Gabriel Qaṭraya, or to an author identified simply as ‘Qaṭraya’. A poem quoted anonymously by Shbadnaya also cites Isaac of Nineveh, raising the question how his reception of these authors was mediated. This paper presents a first edition and English translation of these quotations from Shbadnaya’s larger work, and explores the character and genre of these quotations, most of which seem to be exegetical or chronological. This is a first step toward charting the reception of the Qaṭraya corpus in later East Syriac literature and thought.

Research paper thumbnail of History and Self-Concept in the Fifteenth-Century Church of the East: The Works of Isḥāq Šbadnāyā and Īšōʿyahb bar Mqaddam

Parole de l'Orient (forthcoming)

The Church of the East in fifteenth-century Iraq may appear to modern scholars as a community wi... more The Church of the East in fifteenth-century Iraq may appear to modern scholars as a community without a past. No textual narrative of East Syrian history has survived from the fifteenth century, or for several centuries thereafter. New hagiographical poems were composed in the fifteenth century, but the saints whom they commemorated were without exception pre-Islamic. Even the succession of catholicos-patriarchs of the East only re-emerges into historians’ awareness after 1477, following almost a century of obscurity. Fifteenth-century East Syrian sources show no interest in their recent communal past, or in reconstructing the order of events in their older history.
Yet the Church of the East thought of itself as a community with a past. Although the long “Poem on the Economy of God from ‘In the Beginning’ until Eternity” by the fifteenth-century priest Isḥāq Šbadnāyā is primarily a synthesis of theology and exegesis, it also provides a tightly sequenced and dated discussion of the foundation of the Church by Jesus and the apostles, as well as unordered appeals to previous authors (late antique and medieval) as authorities in exegetical and doctrinal discussions. Šbadnāyā and his contemporary Īšōʿyahb bar Mqaddam, the Metropolitan of Erbil, also composed liturgical poetry for various occasions. These texts show that, in contrast to modern Western views of history, the fifteenth-century Church of the East regarded its recent past as less important than its ancient past.

Research paper thumbnail of Syriac Christology and Christian Community in the Fifteenth-Century Church of the East

Syriac Christology has largely been investigated from a Western European perspective to determine... more Syriac Christology has largely been investigated from a Western European perspective to determine whether it is heretical or not. Such investigations have typically focused on a small number of doctrinal formulae and the terminology of philosophical theology. My study starts from a different position, trying to understand how the Church of the East (the so-called “Nestorian Church”) understood the nature of its collective social life in the fifteenth century. Since “Christian” was their most specific primary term of identification, one would expect their self-conception to be related to their concept of Christ. Contrary to what many have expected, it seems that doctrinal distinction was not the most important factor of Christology for East Syrian self-understanding. By exploring not only the terms of abstract doctrines but also the more common liturgical and literary images of Christ in this period, this study argues that dogmatic theology is not the center of Syriac Christians’ understanding either of Christ or of themselves; rather than what they believed about Christ, they were most concerned with what they received from Christ, especially protection in this world and salvation to come. On the other hand, Christ’s roles as Lord and Savior not only of his community but of all creation, simultaneously reinforced and called into question the notion that the Church of the East could be defined by a special status as beneficiaries of Christ’s salvation. Primarily drawing from the texts for dominical feasts in a fifteenth-century Ḥūdrā manuscript (BL Add. 7177) and the Īsḥāq Shbadnāyā’s unedited masterpiece, “The Poem on God’s Economy from ‘In the Beginning’ until Eternity,” my paper presents convergences and divergences in how each source presents Christ, and how each aspect of their Christology correlates to notions of Christian community. The paper reveals a nuanced notion of what Christianity meant in the fifteenth century.

Research paper thumbnail of Review of Li Tang, East Syriac Christianity in Mongol-Yuan China

The study of Christianity in pre-modern China is a challenging field which is experiencing a surg... more The study of Christianity in pre-modern China is a challenging field which is experiencing a surge of interest. Li Tang has been in the thick of this research, from her earlier volume primarily on Christianity in the Tang period, to participating in all three conferences organized at Universität Salzburg on the theme, “Research on the Church of the East in China and Central Asia” (2003, 2006, 2009). Prof. Tang co-edited with Dietmar Winkler the volume of papers from the second conference, while the volume presently under review extensively used the proceedings of the first conference. As she remarks in the preface to the current volume, more studies have focused on Christianity in Tang China than under Mongol rule (xv), which makes the current volume all the more necessary and remarkable.

The importance of the present volume lies primarily in its presentation for the first time of portions of several Chinese-language sources in English translation...

Research paper thumbnail of A Light From “the Dark Centuries”: Isḥaq Shbadnaya's Life and Works

xa.yimg.com

Isḥaq Shbadnaya is an important if almost entirely unknown author of the Church of the East in th... more Isḥaq Shbadnaya is an important if almost entirely unknown author of the Church of the East in the fifteenth century. This article brings together the few and contradictory references to him in the secondary literature and uses manuscript evidence to adjudicate the different dates and names assigned to him. It also gathers what biographical information we can glean about him and describes his works: one major exegetical work, three liturgical ‘onyatha, and a previously unknown short poem. The article concludes by demonstrating Isḥaq Shbadnaya’s continued importance in the East Syrian community from the fifteenth into the twentieth century.

Research paper thumbnail of Christianity in Fifteenth-Century Iraq: The Church of the East as a Conceptual Community

Mainstream historical scholarship has largely neglected the social diversity of the medieval Midd... more Mainstream historical scholarship has largely neglected the social diversity of the medieval Middle East: the vast majority of studies focus on Muslim elites, whether political or religious. Non-Muslim populations have been studied almost exclusively by specialists in the fields of Judaic, Syriac, Armenian, and Coptic studies, often neglecting other populations in the historical context, or by specialists in Islamic studies as dhimmīs from the perspective of Muslim jurists, eliding the distinct experiences of non-Muslims. Yet as late as the sixteenth century Christians were more than a third of the population in northern Iraq. This dissertation examines how one branch of medieval Middle Eastern Christianity, the Church of the East (called “Nestorian” by outsiders), understood the nature of its own community in the fifteenth century. In doing so it challenges Euro-centric studies of Christianity and Islamo-centric studies of the Middle East, and places a medieval Middle Eastern non-Muslim population in their social and cultural context.

Research paper thumbnail of Beyond Gadgetology: Basic Concepts for Assessing the Limitations of Digital Methods

Humanities scholars are trained to critique power relationships and representations, while techno... more Humanities scholars are trained to critique power relationships and representations, while technology practitioners are trained to optimize what computers do, but who might think critically about the limitations of applying digital methods to humanities scholarship? And how might we do that? The digital world is, by default, very tidy, while the real world is very messy, so to what degree can we use digital methods to investigate the world of human phenomena? This session proposes a few basic concepts for assessing digital methods, and then discusses some common digital approaches in light of the concepts proposed.

Research paper thumbnail of Identity and Identification in the Digital Humanities: The Challenges and Experience of Syriaca.org

The growing field of digital humanities seeks to bring together research problems defined in the ... more The growing field of digital humanities seeks to bring together research problems defined in the humanities with the amazing surge of computational power developed in recent technology. The result is a constellation of new tools being developed to enable humanistic research, while grappling with the theoretical issues distinctive to the humanities which resist the tidy definition of problems and answers in terms of mathematical formulae and computational precision. One such tool is the Syriac Reference Portal (Syriaca.org), a reference website for Syriac Studies currently being developed jointly by researchers at six institutions including Vanderbilt University, Princeton University, and the Beth Mardutho Research Library. This talk will present an overview and partial demo of Syriaca.org which is collecting data about Syriac authors, saints, people mentioned in Syriac texts, and places, while enabling automatic linking of our data with existing tools such as online manuscript catalogs. The talk will consider challenges of "identity" and "identification" in relation to digitization. The problem of the identity of past persons, places, and objects (such as manuscripts) includes the question of how to represent multiple and/or ambiguous identification within the constraints of databases. The Syriac reference portal has worked to overcome these issues through collaboration between technical experts and humanities researchers, in order to develop tools useful for complex data discovery, authority control and context-independent identifiers for computational use.

Research paper thumbnail of The Visual Culture of Later Byzantium (c.1081–c.1350), parts 1 & 2.

by Foteini Spingou, Charles Barber, Nathan Leidholm, Thomas Carlson, Ivan Drpić, Alexandros (Alexander) Alexakis, elizabeth jeffreys, Theocharis Tsampouras, Mircea G . Duluș, Nikos Zagklas, Ida Toth, Alexander Riehle, Brad Hostetler, Michael Featherstone, Emmanuel C Bourbouhakis, Shannon Steiner, Efthymios Rizos, Divna Manolova, Robert Romanchuk, Maria Tomadaki, Kirsty Stewart, Baukje van den Berg, Katarzyna Warcaba, Florin Leonte, Vasileios Marinis, Ludovic Bender, Linda Safran, Sophia Kalopissi-Verti, Rachele Ricceri, Luisa Andriollo, Alex J Novikoff, Annemarie Carr, Marina Bazzani, Greti Dinkova-Bruun, Renaat Meesters, Daphne (Dafni) / Δάφνη Penna / Πέννα, Annemarie Carr, Alexander Alexakis, Jeremy Johns, Maria Parani, Lisa Mahoney, Irena Spadijer, and Ilias Taxidis

ISBN: 9781108483056 Series: Sources for Byzantine Art History 3 In this book the beauty and m... more ISBN: 9781108483056
Series: Sources for Byzantine Art History 3

In this book the beauty and meaning of Byzantine art and its aesthetics are for the first time made accessible through the original sources. More than 150 medieval texts are translated from nine medieval languages into English, with commentaries from over seventy leading scholars. These include theories of art, discussions of patronage and understandings of iconography, practical recipes for artistic supplies, expressions of devotion, and descriptions of cities. The volume reveals the cultural plurality and the interconnectivity of medieval Europe and the Mediterranean from the late eleventh to the early fourteenth centuries. The first part uncovers salient aspects of Byzantine artistic production and its aesthetic reception, while the second puts a spotlight on particular ways of expressing admiration and of interpreting of the visual.