The Byzantine Past as Text: Historiography and Political Renewal c. 900 (original) (raw)
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Ideologies & Identities in the Medieval Byzantine World
In our research project, the term ideology has a central role. This is a most debated concept that in historical studies is often used either in a pejorative fashion, i.e. ideology as rigid worldview or manipulative propaganda, or in an analytically rather toothless fashion, i.e. as a homogenizing discourse with no relation to social stratification, interest differentiation and power relations.
Keynote lecture at the 7th International Symposium “Days of Justinian I,” Skopje, 15-16 November, 2019.
Historiography and Identity IV: Writing History across Medieval Eurasia
2021
Historical writing has shaped identities in various ways and to different extents. This volume explores this multiplicity by looking at case studies from Europe, Byzantium, the Islamic World, and China around the turn of the first millennium. The chapters in this volume address official histories and polemical critique, traditional genres and experimental forms, ancient traditions and emerging territories, empires and barbarians. The authors do not take the identities highlighted in the texts for granted, but examine the complex strategies of identification that they employ. This volume thus explores how historiographical works in diverse contexts construct and shape identities, as well as legitimate political claims and communicate ‘visions of community’. Introduction: Historiography and Identity in a Comparative Perspective — WALTER POHL ‘National History’ in Post-Imperial East Asia and Europe — Q. EDWARD WANG The Wars of Procopius and the Jinshu of Fang Xuanling: Representations of Barbarian Political Figures in Classicizing Historiography — RANDOLPH B. FORD Mythology and Genealogy in the Canonical Sources of Japanese History — BERNHARD SCHEID Iran’s Conversion to Islam and History Writing as an Art for Forgetting — SARAH BOWEN SAVANT Iran and Islam: Two Narratives — MICHAEL COOK The Formation of South Arabian Identity in al-Iklīl of al-Hamdānī — DANIEL MAHONEY Convergence and Multiplicity in Byzantine Historiography: Literary Trends in Syriac and Greek, Ninth to Twelfth Centuries — SCOTT FITZGERALD JOHNSON The Byzantine Past as Text: Historiography and Political Renewal c. 900 — EMMANUEL C. BOURBOUHAKIS Scriptores post Theophanem: Normative Aspects of Imperial Historiography in Tenth-Century Byzantium — YANNIS STOURAITIS Who were the Lotharingians? Defining Political Community after the End of the Carolingian Empire — SIMON MACLEAN Spaces of ‘Convivencia’ and Spaces of Polemics: Transcultural Historiography and Religious Identity in the Intellectual Landscape of the Iberian Peninsula, Ninth to Tenth Centuries — MATTHIAS M. TISCHLER Mapping Historiography: An Essay in Comparison — WALTER POHL
Collective identity in the so-called Byzantine Empire is a much-debated issue that has drawn a lot of attention over the years. The current paper attempts a critical assessment of the hitherto main lines of thinking about Byzantine identity, focussing on the period between the seventh and the thirteenth centuries. By proposing an alternative view on source material based on a comprehensive theoretical framework, I argue that a conceptualization of the collective identity of this medieval imperial social order with its constantly fluctuating geopolitical and cultural boundaries needs to be disconnected from essentialist and reifying views on perennial ethnicity as well as from the modern phenomenon of the nation-state.
Yannis Stouraitis A comparative approach to the social role of history in the construction and communication of collective identity in Latin Europe, Byzantium, and Islam towards the end of the first millennium seems to be facilitated by the common cognitive character of historiography in these three cultural spheres. It is generally accepted that the so-called Western historiographical tradition was marked by the role of the person. An author wrote his or her work of history for other persons with the aim to provide them with knowledge of the past, the image of which remained constantly open to scrutiny and reformulation. 1 In contrast, in the East Asian historiographical tradition history writing was principally considered as an official, state-run task. The ruling power employed public servants to anonymously write history based on facts provided by state documents. The latter were to be destroyed after the conclusion of the work in order to prevent any revision of what was intended to become the final, official version of the past published under the seal of state authority. The emperor was not allowed to see the text before it had taken its original final form. 2 1 Liakos, 'Γνωστική ή δεοντολογική ιστοριογραφία' , pp. 209-10. 2 Sato, 'Cognitive Historiography' , pp. 130-33.
Identity and confession in the Byzantine Empire at the beginning of the Middle Ages
The correct religious confession resides at the core of the Byzantine identity at the beginning of the Middle Ages, together with the pagan Greek-Roman tradition. Historians and chroniclers from this period use elements with a religious connotation in different proportions in their works, but even those who don’t speak openly about Christianity share a Christian identity. There is a tension between the classical tradition of writing history and the Christian doctrine, the historians avoiding Christian terminology because it didn’t exist in the works they used as a model. This tension disappears from the 7th century onwards, when the Christianization of the historical terminology becomes the norm.