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Author: Floris Bernard
Publisher:
Published: 2018
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9780674736986
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Poems of Christopher of Mytilene and John Mauropous collects the varied Byzantine Greek verses of these witty and vibrant poets--their epigrams, satires, encomia, polemics, and more--in English for the first time.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2019-05-06
Total Pages: 590
ISBN-13: 9004392882
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book offers the first complete overview of Byzantine poetry from the 4th to the 15th century. By bringing together 22 scholars, it explores the development of poetic trends and the interaction between poetry and society throughout the Byzantine millennium; it addresses a wide range of issues concerning the writing and reading of poetry (such as style, language, metrics, function, and circulation); and it surveys a large number of texts by looking closely at their place within the social and cultural milieus of their authors. Overall, the volume aims to enhance our understanding of Byzantine poetry and shed light on its important place in Byzantine literary culture. Contributors are Eirini Afentoulidou, Gianfranco Agosti, Roderick Beaton, Floris Bernard, Carolina Cupane, Kristoffel Demoen, Ivan Drpic, Jürgen Fuchsbauer, Antonia Giannouli, Martin Hinterberger, Wolfram Hörandner, Elizabeth Jeffreys, Michael Jeffreys, Marc Lauxtermann, Ingela Nilsson, Emilie van Opstall, Andreas Rhoby, Kurt Smolak, Foteini Spingou, Maria Tomadaki, Ioannis Vassis, Nikos Zagklas.
Author: Alcimus Avitus
Publisher:
Published: 2022-05-17
Total Pages: 336
ISBN-13: 9780674271265
DOWNLOAD EBOOKBiblical and Pastoral Poetry was written by Alcimus Avitus, bishop of Vienne, in the late fifth or early sixth century. This volume presents new English translations alongside the Latin texts of the Spiritual History, his most famous work which narrates biblical stories, and verses addressed to his sister, In Consolatory Praise of Chastity.
Author: Ovid
Publisher:
Published: 2020
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9780674238381
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe pseudonymous Appendix Ovidiana--which includes nature, erotic, and religious poetry--reflects different understandings of an admired Classical poet and expands his legacy through the Middle Ages. This is the first comprehensive collection and English translation of these medieval Latin verses ascribed to Ovid.
Author: Jonathan Shea
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2020-05-14
Total Pages: 219
ISBN-13: 0755601955
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe eleventh century marked a turning point in the history of the Byzantine Empire. At its start Byzantium was the paramount power in the Mediterranean world, by turns feared, respected and admired. By the century's close the empire had lost half of its territory and had managed only a partial recovery under the leadership of the Komnenos family. How did a powerful and famously wealthy empire collapse so quickly? The contemporary accounts of this turbulent 'long' century (taken here as c. 950–1100) attribute the empire's decline to the emperors' reckless and self-serving favouring of civilian bureaucrats and, while these sources are today widely acknowledged as biased and unreliable, modern assessments of the century have hitherto failed to suggest any tangible alternatives. To circumvent this dearth of archival material, Jonathan Shea has meticulously analysed 2,200 unpublished seals from the period (more than a third of the known total extant today) to uncover exactly whom the emperors were favouring and promoting, as well as developing a nuanced and revealing picture of the makeup of the much-chastised civilian bureaucracy. The sigillographic evidence is throughout measured against the written material to give a fresh account of this key transitional century and a rare insight into Byzantine politics.
Author: James Howard-Johnston
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2020-09-10
Total Pages: 320
ISBN-13: 0192578685
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe history of Byzantium pivots around the eleventh century, during which it reached its apogee in terms of power, prestige, and territorial extension, only then to plunge into steep political decline following serious military defeats and extensive territorial losses. The political, economic, and intellectual history of the period is reasonably well understood, but not so what was happening in that crucial intermediary sphere, the social order, which both shaped and was shaped by contemporary ideas and brute economic developments. This volume aims to deepen understanding of Byzantine society by examining material evidence for settlements and production in different regions and by sifting through the far from plentiful literary and documentary sources in order to track what was happening in town and country. There is evidence of significant change: the pattern of landownership continued to shift in favour of those with power and wealth, but there was sustained and effective resistance from peasant villages. Provincial towns prospered in what was an era of sustained economic growth, and, through newly emboldened local elites, took a more active part in public affairs. In the capital the middling classes, comprising much of officialdom and leading traders, gained in importance, while the twin military and civilian elites were merging to form a single governing class. However, despite this social upheaval, careful analysis of these various factors by a range of leading Byzantine historians and archaeologists leads to the overarching conclusion that it was not so much internal structural changes which contributed to the vertiginous decline suffered by Byzantium in the late eleventh century, as the unprecedented combination of dangerous adversaries on different fronts, in the east, north, and west.
Author: Paul Stephenson
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2010-12-20
Total Pages: 863
ISBN-13: 1136727868
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Byzantine World presents the latest insights of the leading scholars in the fields of Byzantine studies, history, art and architectural history, literature, and theology. Those who know little of Byzantine history, culture and civilization between AD 700 and 1453 will find overviews and distillations, while those who know much already will be afforded countless new vistas. Each chapter offers an innovative approach to a well-known topic or a diversion from a well-trodden path. Readers will be introduced to Byzantine women and children, men and eunuchs, emperors, patriarchs, aristocrats and slaves. They will explore churches and fortifications, monasteries and palaces, from Constantinople to Cyprus and Syria in the east, and to Apulia and Venice in the west. Secular and sacred art, profane and spiritual literature will be revealed to the reader, who will be encouraged to read, see, smell and touch. The worlds of Byzantine ceremonial and sanctity, liturgy and letters, Orthodoxy and heresy will be explored, by both leading and innovative international scholars. Ultimately, readers will find insights into the emergence of modern Byzantine studies and of popular Byzantine history that are informative, novel and unexpected, and that provide a thorough understanding of both.
Author: Chris Wickham
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2023-03-16
Total Pages: 836
ISBN-13: 019259849X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA new account of the Mediterranean economy in the 10th to 12th centuries, forcing readers to entirely rethink the underlying logic to medieval economic systems. Chris Wickham re-examines documentary and archaeological sources to give a detailed account of both individual economies, and their relationships with each other. Chris Wickham offers a new account of the Mediterranean economy in the tenth to twelfth centuries, based on a completely new look at the sources, documentary and archaeological. Our knowledge of the Mediterranean economy is based on syntheses which are between 50 and 150 years old; they are based on outdated assumptions and restricted data sets, and were written before there was any usable archaeology; and Wickham contends that they have to be properly rethought. This is the first book ever to give a fully detailed comparative account of the regions of the Mediterranean in this period, in their internal economies and in their relationships with each other. It focusses on Egypt, Tunisia, Sicily, the Byzantine empire, Islamic Spain and Portugal, and north-central Italy, and gives the first comprehensive account of the changing economies of each; only Byzantium has a good prior synthesis. It aims to force our rethinking of how economies worked in the medieval Mediterranean. It also offers a rethinking of how we should understand the underlying logic of the medieval economy in general.
Author: Roland Betancourt
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2020-10-06
Total Pages: 288
ISBN-13: 069117945X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"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: Floris Bernard
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2014-07-17
Total Pages: 395
ISBN-13: 0191008788
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn the mid-eleventh century, secular Byzantine poetry attained a hitherto unseen degree of wit, vividness, and personal involvement, chiefly exemplified in the poetry of Christophoros Mitylenaios, Ioannes Mauropous, and Michael Psellos. This is the first volume to consider this poetic activity as a whole, critically reconsidering modern assumptions about Byzantine poetry, and focusing on Byzantine conceptions of the role of poetry in society. By providing a detailed account of the various media through which poetry was presented to its readers, and by tracing the initial circulation of poems, this volume takes an interest in the Byzantine reader and his/her reading habits and strategies, allowing aspects of performance and visual representation, rarely addressed, to come to the fore. It also examines the social interests that motivated the composition of poetry, establishing a connection with the extraordinary social mobility of the time. Self-representative strategies are analyzed against the background of an unstable elite struggling to find moral justification, which allows the study to raise the question of patronage, examine the discourse used by poets to secure material rewards, and explain the social dynamics of dedicatory epigrams. Finally, gift exchange is explored as a medium that underlines the value of poetry and confirms the exclusive nature of intellectual friendship.
