The Oxford History of Byzantium (original) (raw)
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This is a book on the history of the Byzantine Empire, one of the longest-lived and most important cultures in Western civilization, but also one of the least understood. The book is meant to be both concise and comprehensive, and as such it has been necessary to make a variety of decisions and sacrifices. The history of Byzantium is well over a thousand years in duration and any reason- able book on the subject must prepare the ground with consideration of the institutions and the issues of what came before; it must also consider the aftermath of the empire and the ways in which its culture has continued to affect our lives over the past 500 years. Given all that, serious thought had to be devoted to organization and to questions of inclusion and focus.
Scrinium, 2018
This review article is a collective work of five scholars who have written their reviews and/or responses to the twelve chapters of the recently published Cambridge Intellectual History of Byzantium. These reviews discuss such issues as institutional settings, classical scholarship, rhetoric, political theory, literary criticism, historiography, logic, and philosophy in Byzantium. They also deal with the reception of the Neoplatonic ideas in Byzantium as well as with some individual figures such as Maximos the Confessor and Michael Psellos.
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
This review article is a collective work of five scholars who have written their reviews and/or responses to the twelve chapters of the recently published Cambridge Intellectual History of Byzantium. These reviews discuss such issues as institutional settings, classical scholarship, rhetoric, political theory, literary criticism, historiography, logic, and philosophy in Byzantium. They also deal with the reception of the Neoplatonic ideas in Byzantium as well as with some individual figures such as Maximos the Confessor and Michael Psellos.
Byzantium: the History 1025-1204 CE (book chapter)
Systematic chapter to be published in: Falko Daim (ed.), Byzanz. Historisch-Kulturwissenschaftliches Handbuch (Neuer Pauly, Supplementband 11), Verlag J. B. Metzler, to be published 2016, ca. 600 pages. See: http://web.rgzm.de/no\_cache/forschung/schwerpunkte-und-projekte/a/article/byzanz-geschichte-und-kultur-neuer-pauly-supplementband-10.html
A History of Byzantium by Timothy E. Gregory
The International history review
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Introduction to the Cambridge Intellectual History of Byzantium (co-authored with Anthony Kaldellis)
The Cambridge Intellectual History of Byzantium, edited by Anthony Kaldellis and Niketas Siniossoglou , 2017
Ideas have lives of their own. Their genealogies, careers, mutations, and legacies form historical patterns and ontologies different from those of individual human beings and societies, though they are linked to them in manifold ways. Ideally, the history of ideas should be studied diachroni- cally and across the boundaries of states, cultures, and periods, these being the most important categories that artificially break up intellectual history. Yet the questions of how the Byzantines interacted with ideas which they received from earlier periods, and how they developed ideas of their own, are occluded in existing scholarship. It is typical for diachronic studies to jump from antiquity to the Renaissance, reinforcing a particular concept of the genealogy of the “west.” Intellectual histories of the medieval west rarely include the Byzantine world, even though the western tradition draws from the same Greek, Roman, and Christian sources that were also part of the Byzantine patrimony. Moreover, within Byzantine Studies intellectual history is probably the least developed subfield, lacking titles to its name and definition in relation to other inflections of historical inquiry. We have therefore chosen the format of an Intellectual History of Byzantium as a preliminary step toward rectifying this imbalance: first, to provide the resources with which more integrated cross-cultural, diachronic, and analytical narratives may one day be written, and, second, to spur the growing interest in Byzantine intellectual history as a more or less distinct discipline.
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.