Court Ceremonies and Rituals of Power in Byzantium and the Medieval Mediterranean PDF Download

Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004258159
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 603

View

Book Description
Publicly performed rituals and ceremonies form an essential part of medieval political practice and court culture. This applies not only to western feudal societies, but also to the linguistically and culturally highly diversified environment of Byzantium and the Mediterranean basin. The continuity of Roman traditions and cross-fertilization between various influences originating from Constantinople, Armenia, the Arab-Muslim World, and western kingdoms and naval powers provide the framework for a distinct sphere of ritual expression and ceremonial performance. This collective volume, placing Byzantium into a comparative perspective between East and West, examines transformative processes from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages, succession procedures in different political contexts, phenomena of cross-cultural appropriation and exchange, and the representation of rituals in art and literature. Contributors are Maria Kantirea, Martin Hinterberger, Walter Pohl, Andrew Marsham, Björn Weiler, Eric J. Hanne, Antonia Giannouli, Jo Van Steenbergen, Stefan Burkhardt, Ioanna Rapti, Jonathan Shepard, Panagiotis Agapitos, Henry Maguire, Christine Angelidi and Margaret Mullett.

Author: Hugh M. Thomas
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192523406
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284

View

Book Description
Although King John is remembered for his political and military failures, he also resided over a magnificent court. Power and Pleasure reconstructs life at the court of King John and explores how his court produced both pleasure and soft power. Much work exists on courts of the late medieval and early modern periods, but the jump in record keeping under John allows a detailed reconstruction of court life for an earlier period. Power and Pleasure: Court Life under King John, 1199-1216 examines the many facets of John's court, exploring hunting, feasting, castles, landscapes, material luxury, chivalry, sexual coercion, and religious activities. It explains how John mishandled his use of soft power, just as he failed to exploit his financial and military advantages, and why he received so little political benefit from his magnificent court. John's court is viewed in comparison to other courts of the time, and in previous and subsequent centuries.

Author: Charikleia Diamanti
Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1789692636
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 454

View

Book Description
The 30 studies presented here are dedicated to Sophia Kalopissi-Verti, Emerita of Byzantine Archaeology at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. They cover a large variety of topics presenting unpublished archaeological material, suggesting new approaches to various aspects of Byzantine archaeology, material culture and art history.

Author: Roland Betancourt
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069117945X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 288

View

Book Description
"Intersectionality, a term coined in 1989, is rapidly increasing in importance within the academy, as well as in broader civic conversations. It describes the study of overlapping or intersecting social identities such as race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, and sexual orientation alongside related systems of oppression, domination, and discrimination. Together, these frameworks are used to understand how systematic injustice or social inequality occurs. In this book, Roland Betancourt examines the presence of marginalized identities and intersectionality in the medieval era. He reveals the fascinating, little-examined conversations in medieval thought and visual culture around matters of sexual and reproductive consent, bullying, non-monogamous marriages, homosocial and homoerotic relationships, trans and non-binary gender identifications, representations of disability, and the oppression of minorities. In contrast to contemporary expectations of the medieval world, this book looks at these problems from the Byzantine Empire and its neighbors in the eastern mediterranean through sources ranging from late antiquity and early Christianity up to the early modern period. In each of five chapters, Betancourt provides short, carefully scaled narratives used to illuminate nuanced and surprising takes on now-familiar subjects by medieval thinkers and artists. For example, Betancourt examines depictions of sexual consent in images of the Virgin; the origins of sexual shaming and bullying in the story of Empress Theodora; early beginnings of trans history as told in the lives of saints who lived portions of their lives within different genders; and the ways in which medieval authors understood and depicted disabilities. Deeply researched, this is a groundbreaking new look at medieval culture for a new generation of scholars"--

Author: Shaun Tougher
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429590466
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 646

View

Book Description
The subject of the emperor in the Byzantine world may seem likely to be a well-studied topic but there is no book devoted to the emperor in general covering the span of the Byzantine empire. Of course there are studies on individual emperors, dynasties and aspects of the imperial office/role, but there remains no equivalent to Fergus Millar’s The Emperor in the Roman World (from which the proposed volume takes inspiration for its title and scope). The oddity of a lack of a general study of the Byzantine emperor is compounded by the fact that a series of books devoted to Byzantine empresses was published in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Thus it is appropriate to turn the spotlight on the emperor. Themes covered by the contributions include: questions of dynasty and imperial families; the imperial court and the emperor’s men; imperial duties and the emperor as ruler; imperial literature (the emperor as subject and author); and the material emperor, including imperial images and spaces. The volume fills a need in the field and the market, and also brings new and cutting-edge approaches to the study of the Byzantine emperor. Although the volume cannot hope to be a comprehensive treatment of the emperor in the Byzantine world it aims to cover a broad chronological and thematic span and to play a vital part in setting the agenda for future work. The subject of the Byzantine emperor has also an obvious relevance for historians working on rulership in other cultures and periods.

Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004686371
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 402

View

Book Description
This is Volume Two of a two-volume collection that brings together contributions from cultural and military history to offer an examination of religious rites employed in connection with warfare as well as their transformative and power- and identity-building potential across political communities of medieval Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe. Covering the period ca. 900 and 1500, the work takes theoretical, textual and practical approaches to the research on religious warfare, and investigates the connections between, and significance and function of crucial war rituals such as pre-, intra- and postbellum rites, as well as various activities surrounding the military life of individuals, polities, and corporates. Contributors are Robert Antonín, Robert Bubczyk, Dariusz Dąbrowski, Jesse Harrington, Carsten Selch Jensen, Sini Kangas, Radosław Kotecki, Gregory Leighton, Kyle C. Lincoln, Jacek Maciejewski, Yulia Mikhailova, Max Naderer, László Veszprémy, and Dušan Zupka.

Author: Manuel Alejandro Rodríguez de la Peña
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000959007
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 283

View

Book Description
This book focuses on why the diffusion of the political theology of royal wisdom created “Solomonic” princes with intellectual interests all around the medieval West and how these learned rulers changed the face of Western Europe through their policies and the cultural power of medieval monarchy. Princely wisdom narratives have been seen simply as a tool of royal propaganda in the Middle Ages but these narratives were much more than propaganda, being rather a coherent ideology which transformed princely courts, shaped mentalities, and influenced key political decisions. This cultural power of medieval monarchy was channelled mainly through princely patronage of learning and the arts, but the rise of administrative monarchy and its bureaucracy are equally related to these policies. This can only be understood through a cultural approach to the history of medieval politics, that is, a history of the relationship between knowledge and power in the Middle Ages, a topic much analyzed regarding the medieval church but sometimes neglected in the princely sphere. This volume is a study that supplies an important comparative study of the reception in princely courts of a key aspect of European medieval civilization: The ideal of Christian sapiential rulership and its corollary, rationality in government. This volume is essential reading for students and scholars interested in understanding the medieval roots of the cultural process which gave rise to the modern state.

Author: Nicola Di Cosmo
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108548105
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 544

View

Book Description
Empires and Exchanges in Eurasian Late Antiquity offers an integrated picture of Rome, China, Iran, and the Steppes during a formative period of world history. In the half millennium between 250 and 750 CE, settled empires underwent deep structural changes, while various nomadic peoples of the steppes (Huns, Avars, Turks, and others) experienced significant interactions and movements that changed their societies, cultures, and economies. This was a transformational era, a time when Roman, Persian, and Chinese monarchs were mutually aware of court practices, and when Christians and Buddhists criss-crossed the Eurasian lands together with merchants and armies. It was a time of greater circulation of ideas as well as material goods. This volume provides a conceptual frame for locating these developments in the same space and time. Without arguing for uniformity, it illuminates the interconnections and networks that tied countless local cultural expressions to far-reaching inter-regional ones.

Author: Maximilian C. G. Lau
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198888678
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401

View

Book Description
John II Komnenos was born into an empire on the brink of destruction, with his father Alexios barely preserving the empire in the face of civil wars and invasions. A hostage to crusaders as a child, married to a Hungarian princess as a teenager to win his father an alliance, and leading his own campaigns when his father died, it was left to John to try and rebuild the empire all but lost in the eleventh century. This book, the first English language study on John and his era, re-evaluates an emperor traditionally overlooked in favour of his father, hero of the Alexiad written by John's sister Anna, and of his son Manuel, acclaimed for reigning at the height of Komnenian power. John's reign is one of contradictions, as his capital of New Rome/Constantinople was to fall to the armies of the Fourth Crusade just over sixty years after he died, and yet his descendants led vibrant successor states based in the lands that John reconquered. His reign lacks a dominant textual source, and so this history is related as much through personal letters, court literature, archaeology, and foreign accounts as through traditional historical narratives. This study includes extensive study of the landscapes, castles, and cities John built and campaigned through, and provides a guide to the world in which John lived. It covers the empire's neighbours and rivals, the turning points of ecclesiastical history, the shaping of the crusader movement, and the workings of Byzantine government and administration.

Author: Christian Rollinger
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 180207564X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

View

Book Description
Empresses-in-Waiting comprises case studies of late antique empresses, female members of imperial dynasties, and female members of the highest nobility of the late Roman empire, ranging from the fourth to the seventh centuries AD. Situated in the context of the broader developments of scholarship on late antique and byzantine empresses, this volume explores the political agency, religious authority, and influence of imperial and near-imperial women within the Late Roman imperial court, which is understood as a complex spatial, social, and cultural system, the centre of patronage networks, and an arena for elite competition. The studies explore female performance and representation in literary and visual media as well as in court ceremonial, and discuss the opportunities and constraints of female power within a male dominated court environment and the broader realms of imperial activity. By focusing on imperial women, the volume not only addresses questions of gendered rhetoric and agency but throws into relief general dynamics in the exercise of imperial power during a period in which the classical Mediterranean world at large, as well as the Roman monarchy, underwent crucial transformations.