Strangers to Themselves: the Byzantine Outsider PDF Download

Author: Dion C. Smythe
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Author: Dion C. Smythe
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351897802
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
March 1998 saw Byzantinists gathering together at the University of Sussex in Brighton, for the annual symposium held by the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies. Their aim was to consider the question of the 'Byzantine outsider'. Some categories of outsiders appear clear and simple: those marked out by class, race, sex, religion. But these categories are not universals. Today, historians of all periods are examining the ways in which we analyse the divisions in our societies, which can determine how we look at societies in the past. There is no consensus on who forms the 'outsider class' in modern society; it should come as no surprise that there was no consensus in Byzantium as to who the outsiders were, what they had done to deserve that status, and what the result of their attaining it should have been. The papers in this collection, drawn from the large number presented at the XXXII Spring Symposium, continue the debate about the idea of the 'Byzantine outsider'. The scholars within - theologians, historians, literary critics and art historians - present differing approaches to different aspects of the problem. The volume does not aim to have the 'last word', but rather to provoke debate and to open the field. Any examination of society that uses the concept of the outsider has implicitly within it a concept of the 'insider'. By looking at those on the margins it becomes easier to see who were - or at least thought they were - on the inside.

Author: Dion Smythe
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Byzantine Empire
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description

Author: Dion C. Smythe
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351897799
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
March 1998 saw Byzantinists gathering together at the University of Sussex in Brighton, for the annual symposium held by the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies. Their aim was to consider the question of the 'Byzantine outsider'. Some categories of outsiders appear clear and simple: those marked out by class, race, sex, religion. But these categories are not universals. Today, historians of all periods are examining the ways in which we analyse the divisions in our societies, which can determine how we look at societies in the past. There is no consensus on who forms the 'outsider class' in modern society; it should come as no surprise that there was no consensus in Byzantium as to who the outsiders were, what they had done to deserve that status, and what the result of their attaining it should have been. The papers in this collection, drawn from the large number presented at the XXXII Spring Symposium, continue the debate about the idea of the 'Byzantine outsider'. The scholars within - theologians, historians, literary critics and art historians - present differing approaches to different aspects of the problem. The volume does not aim to have the 'last word', but rather to provoke debate and to open the field. Any examination of society that uses the concept of the outsider has implicitly within it a concept of the 'insider'. By looking at those on the margins it becomes easier to see who were - or at least thought they were - on the inside.

Author: Youval Rotman
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674036116
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Looking at the Byzantine concept of slavery within the context of law, the labour market, medieval politics, and religion, the author illustrates how these contexts both reshaped and sustained the slave market.

Author: Leonora Neville
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521838658
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
The imperial government over the central provinces of the Byzantine Empire was sovereign and, at the same time, apathetic, dealing effectively with a narrow set of objectives, chiefly collecting revenue and maintaining imperial sovereignty. Outside of these spheres, action needed to be solicited from imperial officials, leaving vast opportunities for local people to act independently without legal stricture or fear of imperial involvement. In the absence of imperial intervention provincial households competed with each other for control over community decisions. The emperors exercised just enough strength at the right times to prevent the leaders of important households in the core provinces from becoming rulers themselves. Membership in a successful household, wealth, capacity for effective violence and access to the imperial court were key factors that allowed one to act with authority. This book examines in detail the mechanisms provincial households used to acquire and dispute authority.

Author: Joshua Holo
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139483072
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
Using primary sources, Joshua Holo uncovers the day-to-day workings of the Byzantine-Jewish economy in the middle Byzantine period. Built on a web of exchange systems both exclusive to the Jewish community and integrated in society at large, this economy forces a revision of Jewish history in the region. Paradoxically, the two distinct economic orientations, inward and outward, simultaneously advanced both the integration of the Jews into the larger Byzantine economy and their segregation as a self-contained body economic. Dr Holo finds that the Jews routinely leveraged their internal, even exclusive, systems of law and culture to break into - occasionally to dominate - Byzantine markets. In doing so, they challenge our concept of Diaspora life as a balance between the two competing impulses of integration and segregation. The success of this enterprise, furthermore, qualifies the prevailing claim of Jewish economic decline during the Commercial Revolution.

Author: Dr Michael Saxby
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1472416694
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 469

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Book Description
This volume addresses a theme of special significance for Byzantine studies. Byzantium has traditionally been deemed a civilisation which deferred to authority and set special store by orthodoxy, canon and proper order. Since 1982 when the distinguished Russian Byzantinist Alexander Kazhdan wrote that 'the history of Byzantine intellectual opposition has yet to be written', scholars have increasingly highlighted cases of subversion of 'correct practice' and 'correct belief' in Byzantium. This innovative scholarly effort has produced important results, although it has been hampered by the lack of dialogue across the disciplines of Byzantine studies. The 43rd Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies in 2010 drew together historians, art historians, and scholars of literature, religion and philosophy, who discussed shared and discipline-specific approaches to the theme of subversion. The present volume presents a selection of the papers delivered at the symposium enriched with specially commissioned contributions. Most papers deal with the period after the eleventh century, although early Byzantium is not ignored. Theoretical questions about the nature, articulation and limits of subversion are addressed within the frameworks of individual disciplines and in a larger context. The volume comes at a timely junction in the development of Byzantine studies, as interest in subversion and nonconformity in general has been rising steadily in the field.

Author: Shay Eshel
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004363831
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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In The Concept of the Elect Nation in Byzantium, Shay Eshel shows how the Old Testament model of the ancient Israelites was a prominent factor in the evolution of Roman-Byzantine national awareness between the 7th and 13th centuries. The Byzantines' interpretation of the 7th century epic events as manifestations of God's wrath enabled them to incorporate the events into a paradigm which they now embraced: the Old Testament paradigm of the Israelite Elect Nation's complex relationship with God, a cyclic relation of sin, wrath, punishment, repentance and salvation. The Elect Nation concept enabled the Byzantines to express the shift in their collective identity toward a shrunken, yet more clearly defined, national awareness.

Author: Ioannis Smarnakis
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040021190
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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This book investigates issues of identity and narrativity in late Byzantine romances in a Mediterranean context, covering the chronological span from the capture of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204 to the 16th century. It includes chapters not only on romances that were written and read in the broader Byzantine world but also on literary texts from regions around the Mediterranean Sea. The volume offers new insights and covers a variety of interrelated subjects concerning the narrative representations of self-identities, gender, and communities, the perception of political and cultural otherness, and the interaction of space and time with identity formation. The chapters focus on texts from the Byzantine, western European, and Ottoman worlds, thus promoting a cross-cultural approach that highlights the role of the Mediterranean as a shared environment that facilitated communications, cultural interaction, and the trading and reconfiguration of identities. The volume will appeal to a wide audience of researchers and students alike, specializing in or simply interested in cultural studies, Byzantine, western medieval, and Ottoman history and literature.