Alena Alshanskaya · Andreas Gietzen · Christina Hadjiafxenti (eds), Imagining Byzantium. Perceptions, Patterns, Problems (original) (raw)
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Imagining Byzantium: Perception, Patterns, Problems in Eastern and Southeastern Europe
The international conference "Imagining Byzantium: Perception, Patterns, Problems in Eastern and Southeastern Europe" is organized by the research group "The Legacy of Byzantium" of the Leibniz-WissenschaftsCampus Mainz and will be held on March 2-4, 2017 in Mainz. Belonging to the research group "Contact and Discourse within Christianity", we are researching the impact as well as reception of Byzantine history within and across European dimensions in the 19th and 20th centuries. During the rise of national movements in Europe, a new debate arose about history/-ies which aimed at constructing new political orders (Ordnungsentwürfe). The focus of the conference lies on eastern and south-eastern Europe as a political, cultural, and religious bridge between Orient and Occident, but also on western Europe as a agent of knowledge of Enlightenment as well as a place for education of east and south-east European elites. By means of three panels we would like to discuss in which way scientific, ecclesiastical, and political elites dealt with (pseudo-)Byzantine items, narratives, and paradigms in various contexts in order to strengthen their own identity, to stage or legitimise their power as well as to justify certain political strategies. The individual panels are organised as follows: 1. History and Histories Byzantine Elements in Historiographical Narratives und Discourses 2. Defense or Decadence Reception of Byzantium within Ecclesiastical Historiography 3. Heirs, Empires, Nations "Byzantium" as an Argument for Nation-Builders Co-Operation Partners: Leibniz-Wissenschaftscampus Mainz: Byzanz zwischen Orient und Okzident Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum Leibniz-Institut for European History (IEG) Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz Sponsorship: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Leibniz-WissenschaftsCampus Mainz: Byzanz zwischen Orient und Okzident, Leibniz-Institut für Europäische Geschichte (IEG), Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum Mainz Proceedings published as BOO 11: A. Alshanskaya / A. Gietzen / C. Hadjiafxenti (Hrsg.), Imagining Byzantium. Perceptions, Patterns, Problems (Mainz 2018), (see above section "books").
draft toward AABS Biennial Conference, 2024
Against Anthony Kaldellis and others who believe that the name 'Byzantium' is an artificial and pejorative anachronism, this paper argues that there is neither a convincing substitute for 'Byzantium' nor a need for one. Specifically, (i) the name Romanía, though attested in contemporary documents, is semantically and historically weak; (ii) the claims of pernicious connotations in the name 'Byzantium' are overstated; and (iii) the reason that 'Roman' was preferred from the time of the first Christians is that 'Greek' was aggressively stigmatized and suppressed. The paper concludes that 'Byzantium' is ideologically sounder than the terms that would replace it. Demonstrating that the alternative names are historically forced, the paper proposes that we are better off with a resonant term-of-art than a pretence of authenticity that inadvertently continues a legacy of anti-Hellenism.
Introduction. The Invention of Byzantium in Early Modern Europe
The Invention of Byzantium in Early Modern Europe, 2021
A gulf of centuries separates the Byzantine Empire from the academic field of Byzantine studies. This book offers a new approach to the history of Byzantine scholarship, focusing on the attraction that Byzantium held for Early Modern Europeans and challenging the stereotype that they dismissed the Byzantine Empire as an object of contempt. The authors in this book focus on how and why the Byzantine past was used in Early Modern Europe: to diagnose cultural decline, to excavate the beliefs and practices of early Christians, to defend absolutism or denounce tyranny, and to write strategic ethnography against the Ottomans. By tracing Byzantium’s profound impact on everything from politics to painting, this book shows that the empire and its legacy remained relevant to generations of Western writers, artists, statesmen, and intellectuals as they grappled with the most pressing issues of their day. Refuting reductive narratives of absence or progress, this book shows how “Byzantium” underwent multiple overlapping and often discordant reinventions before the institutionalization of “Byzantine studies” as an academic discipline. As this book suggests, it was precisely Byzantium’s ambiguity—as both Greek and Roman, ancient and medieval, familiar and foreign—that made it such a vibrant and vital part of the Early Modern European imagination.
Byzantium: A Very, Very Short Introduction
James/A Companion to Byzantium, 2010
The history of the empire is a monotonous story of the intrigues of priests, eunuchs and women. " (Lecky 1869 : 13-14). Of course, this is untrue. For a start, the intrigues of women, eunuchs, and priests are perpetually interesting, as any reader of historical fi ction will agree; for another thing, there is a great deal more to Byzantium than political history. But Lecky ' s comment tells us a great deal about what happened when Victorian morality and love of the Greek and Roman worlds came up against the " otherness " of post-Classical, Christian Byzantium, a world empire lasting over a thousand years and covering more than 1,000,000 square kilometers at its greatest extent, from Italy and North Africa to the Black Sea and the Levant (ODB vol. 1: 345). Byzantium has struggled in Western Europe beneath the burden of Edward Gibbon and the Enlightenment, condemning it for superstition and rampant (Orthodox) Christianity, and the nineteenth-century, pruriently appalled by what it liked to see as Byzantium ' s oriental corruption and luxury (Mango 1965). " Byzantine " in English immediately suggests the complicated, infl exible and underhand. The dubious, devious Byzantines themselves are condemned out of hand for their tedious history (all emperors with the same name), lack of literature (where is the Byzantine Iliad or Odyssey ? Tragedy, comedy or poetry?), unrealistic art all looking the same (seen one icon, seen them all), overmastering clericalism (what chance does a theocracy have in any " Age of Reason? "), and general lack of fun. W. B. Yeats has a lot to answer for (Sailing to Byzantium 1927; Byzantium 1930). Byzantium is both too big and too complicated. Despite its Christian nature and its inheritance of the classical world, it seems too strange, bizarre, and alien in its use of both. One of the problems for Western Europeans, educated to believe that the Classics and the Renaissance are the two high points of civilization, is that Byzantium is neither. There has been an eagerness to judge in our terms, measuring Byzantium against what " we " believe to have quality, and an unwillingness to understand Byzantium in its own terms, to consider how it used and developed its Greco-Roman heritage into something different but nevertheless worth our attention. This volume is
The interaction between Byzantium and the Latin West was intimately connected to practically all the major events and developments which shaped the medieval world in the High and Late Middle Ages – for example, the rise of the ‘papal monarchy’, the launch of the crusades, the expansion of international and long-distance commerce, or the flowering of the Renaissance. The aim of the volume is to explore not only the actual avenues of interaction between the two sides (trade, political and diplomatic contacts, ecclesiastical dialogue, intellectual exchange, armed conflict), but also the image each side had of the other and the way perceptions evolved over this long period in the context of their manifold contact. The papers presented here offer new insights and original research on numerous aspects of this relationship, pooling together the expertise of an international group of scholars working on both sides of the Byzantine-western ‘divide’, on topics as diverse as identity formation, court ritual, ecclesiology, literary history, military technology and the economy, among others. The particular contribution of this research is the exploration of how cross-cultural interaction was shaped at the intersection of the thought-world of the historical agents and the material circumstances which circumscribed their actions.