Author : Leonora Neville
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 259 pages
File Size : 25,7 MB
Release : 2012-10-04
Category : History
ISBN : 1107009456
This book reveals how cultural memories of classical Roman honor informed Nikephoros Bryennios' history of the eleventh century and his political choices.
Author : Leonora Alice Neville
Publisher :
Page : 260 pages
File Size : 27,7 MB
Release : 2014-05-14
Category : Byzantine Empire
ISBN : 9781139569002
Nikephoros Bryennios' history of the Byzantine Empire in the 1070s is a story of civil war and aristocratic rebellion in the midst of the Turkish conquest of Anatolia. Commonly remembered as the passive and unambitious husband of Princess Anna Komnene (author of the Alexiad), Bryennios is revealed as a skilled author whose history draws on cultural memories of classical Roman honor and proper masculinity to evaluate the politicians of the 1070s and implicitly to exhort his twelfth-century contemporaries to honorable behavior. Bryennios' story valorizes the memory of his grandfather and other honorable, but failed, generals of the eleventh century while subtly portraying the victorious Alexios Komnenos as un-Roman. This reading of the Material for History sheds new light on twelfth-century Byzantine culture and politics, especially the contested accession of John Komnenos, the relationship between Bryennios' history and the Alexiad and the function of cultural memories of Roman honor in Byzantium.
Author : Ingela Nilsson
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 233 pages
File Size : 10,28 MB
Release : 2020-12-17
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 1108843352
The first comprehensive study of occasional writing in Byzantium, focusing on the literary output of Constantine Manasses.
Author : Aleksandar Jovanović
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 267 pages
File Size : 19,27 MB
Release : 2022-09-28
Category : History
ISBN : 3031092783
This book follows the public life of Michael Palaiologos from his early days and upbringing, through to his assumption of the Byzantine imperial throne in 1258. It explores multiple narratives, highlighting the various public communities in the Byzantine polity, primarily focusing on intellectuals and clerks rather than the emperor himself. Drawing on insights from power relations, studies of class and the public sphere, this book provides an account of thirteenth-century Byzantium that highlights the role of communicative and symbolic actions in the public sphere, and argues they were integral to Palaiologos' political success.
Author : Georgios Theotokis
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 348 pages
File Size : 20,8 MB
Release : 2020-10-27
Category : History
ISBN : 0429574770
War in Eleventh-Century Byzantium presents new insights and critical approaches to warfare between the Byzantine Empire and its neighbours during the eleventh century. Modern historians have identified the eleventh century as a landmark era in Byzantine history. This was a period of invasions, political tumult, financial crisis and social disruption, but it was also a time of cultural and intellectual innovation and achievement. Despite this, the subject of warfare during this period remains underexplored. Addressing an important gap in the historiography of Byzantium, the volume argues that the eleventh century was a period of important geo-political change, when the Byzantine Empire was attacked on all sides, and its frontiers were breached. This book is valuable reading for scholars and students interested in Byzantium history and military history.
Author : Theofili Kampianaki
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 215 pages
File Size : 12,19 MB
Release : 2022-09
Category : Judaism
ISBN : 0192865102
The twelfth-century chronicle of John Zonaras, which begins with the biblical Creation and ends in 1118, is one of the longest historical accounts written in Greek that has come down to us. It was also one of the most popular historical works of the Greek-speaking world during the Middle Ages,with a remarkably large number of manuscripts preserving the entire text or parts of it.John Zonaras' Epitome of Histories: A Compendium of Jewish-Roman History and Its Reception analyses Zonaras' chronicle as both a literary composition and a historical account. It concentrates on its composition, sources, and political, ideological, and literary background. It also includesdiscussions that go beyond the text, such as on the intellectual networks surrounding Zonaras, and the anticipated audience and the reception of the chronicle. By examining such issues, Theofili Kampianaki aims to present Zonaras' chronicle as a product which emerged from a milieu characterized bythe increased contacts with Western people and the Komnenian style of rulership in the imperial bureaucracy, and as a work which seamlessly merges the traditions of chronicle writing and classicizing historiography.
Author : Marc D. Lauxtermann
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 252 pages
File Size : 45,98 MB
Release : 2019-10-18
Category : History
ISBN : 1351803964
The eleventh century in Byzantium is all about being in between, whether this is between Basil II and Alexios Komnenos, between the forces of the Normans, the Pechenegs and the Turks, or between different social groupings, cultural identities and religious persuasions. It is a period of fundamental changes and transformations, both internal and external, but also a period rife with clichés and dominated by the towering presence of Michael Psellos whose usually self-contradictory accounts continue to loom large in the field of Byzantine studies. The essays collected here, which were delivered at the 45th Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, explore new avenues of research and offer new perspectives on this transitional period. The book is divided into four thematic clusters: 'The age of Psellos' studies this crucial figure and seeks to situate him in his time; 'Social structures' is concerned with the ways in which the deep structures of Byzantine society and economy responded to change; 'State and Church' offers a set of studies of various political developments in eleventh-century Byzantium; and 'The age of spirituality' offers the voices of those for whom Psellos had little time and little use: monks, religious thinkers and pious laymen.
Author : Dimitris Krallis
Publisher : Springer
Page : 297 pages
File Size : 47,94 MB
Release : 2019-01-31
Category : History
ISBN : 3030045250
This book is a microhistory of eleventh-century Byzantium, built around the biography of the state official Michael Attaleiates. Dimitris Krallis presents Byzantium as a cohesive, ever-evolving, dynamic, Roman political community, built on traditions of Roman governance and Hellenic culture. In the eleventh century, Byzantium faced a crisis as it navigated a shifting international environment of feudal polities, merchant republics, steppe migrations, and a rapidly transforming Islamic world. Attaleiates’ life, from provincial birth to Constantinopolitan death, and career, as a member of an ancient empire’s officialdom, raise questions of identity, family, education, governance, elite culture, Romanness, Hellenism, science and skepticism, as well as political ideology during this period. The life and work of Attaleiates is used as a prism through which to examine important questions about a long-lived medieval polity that is usually studied as exotic and distinct from both the European and the Near Eastern historical experience.
Author : Samuel Pablo Müller
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 566 pages
File Size : 19,86 MB
Release : 2021-12-13
Category : History
ISBN : 9004499709
Samuel P. Müller offers here the first book-length study of the image of Latins in Byzantine historiography of the long twelfth century, arguing that this image is more complex and ambivalent than often claimed.
Author : Lara Frentrop
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 189 pages
File Size : 44,74 MB
Release : 2023-11-16
Category : History
ISBN : 1000997251
Thousands of intact ceramic bowls and plates as well as fragments made in the medieval Byzantine empire survive to this day. Decorated with figural and non-figural imagery applied in a variety of techniques and adorned with colourful paints and glazes, the vessels can tell us much about those who owned them and those who looked at them. In addition to innumerable ceramic vessels, a handful of precious metal bowls and plates survive from the period. Together, these objects make up the art of dining in medieval Byzantium. This art of dining was effervescent, at turns irreverent and deadly serious, visually stunning and fun. It is suggestive of ways in which those viewing the objects used a quotidian and biologically necessary (f)act – that of eating – to reflect on their lives and deaths, their aspirations and their realities. This book examines the ceramic and metal vessels in terms of the information offered on the foods eaten, the foods desired and their status; the spectacle of the banquet; the relationship between word and image in medieval Byzantium; the dangers of taste; the emergence of new moral and social ideals; and the use of dining as a tool in constructing and enforcing hierarchy. This book is of appeal to scholarly and non-scholarly audiences interested in the art and material culture of the medieval period and in the social history of food and eating.
