Download or read book Divine Inspiration in Byzantium written by Karin Krause and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-06-09 with total page 673 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume, Karin Krause examines conceptions of divine inspiration and authenticity in the religious literature and visual arts of Byzantium. During antiquity and the medieval era, “inspiration” encompassed a range of ideas regarding the divine contribution to the creation of holy texts, icons, and other material objects by human beings. Krause traces the origins of the notion of divine inspiration in the Jewish and polytheistic cultures of the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds and their reception in Byzantine religious culture. Exploring how conceptions of authenticity are employed in Eastern Orthodox Christianity to claim religious authority, she analyzes texts in a range of genres, as well as images in different media, including manuscript illumination, icons, and mosaics. Her interdisciplinary study demonstrates the pivotal role that claims to the divine inspiration of religious literature and art played in the construction of Byzantine cultural identity.
Download or read book Performing the Gospels in Byzantium written by Roland Betancourt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-13 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing the Gospel text from script to illustration to recitation, this study looks at how illuminated manuscripts operated within ritual and architecture. Focusing on a group of richly illuminated lectionaries from the late eleventh century, the book articulates how the process of textual recitation produced marginalia and miniatures that reflected and subverted the manner in which the Gospel was read and simultaneously imagined by readers and listeners alike. This unique approach to manuscript illumination points to images that slowly unfolded in the mind of its listeners as they imagined the text being recited, as meaning carefully changed and built as the text proceeded. By examining this process within specific acoustic architectural spaces and the sonic conditions of medieval chant, the volume brings together the concerns of sound studies, liturgical studies, and art history to demonstrate how images, texts, and recitations played with the environment of the Middle Byzantine church.
Download or read book Performing the Gospels in Byzantium written by Roland Betancourt and published by . This book was released on 2021-05-13 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing the Gospel text from script to illustration to recitation, explores the ritual and architectural context of illuminated manuscripts.
Download or read book The sensual icon written by Bissera V and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Explores the Byzantine aesthetic of fugitive appearances by placing and filming art objects in spaces of changing light, and by uncovering the shifting appearances expressed in poetry, descriptions of art, and liturgical performance"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Byzantine Media Subjects written by Glenn A. Peers and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2024-06-15 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Byzantine Media Subjects invites readers into a world replete with images—icons, frescoes, and mosaics filling places of worship, politics, and community. Glenn Peers asks readers to think themselves into a world where representation reigned and humans followed, and indeed were formed. Interrogating the fundamental role of representation in the making of the Byzantine human, Peers argues that Byzantine culture was (already) posthuman. The Byzantine experience reveals the extent to which media like icons, manuscripts, music, animals, and mirrors fundamentally determine humans. In the Byzantine world, representation as such was deeply persuasive, even coercive; it had the power to affect human relationships, produce conflict, and form self-perception. Media studies has made its subject the modern world, but this book argues for media having made historical subjects. Here, it is shown that media long ago also made Byzantine humans, defining them, molding them, mediating their relationship to time, to nature, to God, and to themselves.
Download or read book Mosaics Empresses and Other Things in Byzantium written by Liz James and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-08-01 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume consists of 15 articles published between 1991 and 2018. It falls into three sections, reflecting different areas of Liz James’s interests. The first section deals with light and colour and mosaics: four articles considering light and colour in mosaics and the making of mosaics, as well as the question of what it means to define mosaics as ‘Byzantine’ are reprinted. The second brings together four pieces on empresses: their relationships with female personifications and the Mother of God; their roles in founding and refounding buildings; and their employment as ciphers by some authors. Finally, seven papers cover a range of topics: what monumental images of saints in churches might have been for; what the differences between relics and icons might have been; how captions to images can be misleading; why touch was an important sense; how words can sometimes ‘just’ be decorative rather than for reading; why the materiality of objects makes a difference. There is also a brief section of additional notes and comments which add to, update and reflect on each piece now in 2024. Mosaics, Empresses and Other Things in Byzantium will be of interest to scholars and students alike interested in material culture, the depiction of regal women, and the use of relics and icons in the Byzantine Empire.
Download or read book Byzantine Materiality written by Evan Freeman and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2024-06-04 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the power of matter and materials in the Eastern Roman Empire, also known as Byzantium. Recent attention to matter as dynamic and meaningful constitutes an emerging, interdisciplinary field of inquiry known as materiality, new materialism, or the material turn. Materials can be symbolic, but matter can also act on human subjects. This volume builds on these insights to consider the role of matter, materials, form, and embodied experiences in Byzantium. In many respects, Byzantine materiality represents a continuation of its Greco-Roman inheritance, which was also shared by neighboring peoples such as the Umayyads and Abbasids. But the Byzantines also developed their own, unique perspectives on matter and form, as with their parsing of the sacred materialities of icons, the Eucharist, and relics. Chapters in this volume consider the cultural meanings and functions of materials such as gold and ivory, the materiality of icons and relics, experiences of objects, as well as Byzantine philosophies of matter and form. Materiality takes center stage in Byzantine constructions of power, luxury, belief, and identity, which will be of interest to scholars and students of Byzantium and the wider medieval world.
Download or read book Radical Platonism in Byzantium written by Niketas Siniossoglou and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-11-03 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking approach to late Byzantine intellectual history and the philosophy of visionary reformer Gemistos Plethon.
Download or read book Liturgy and the Emotions in Byzantium written by Andrew Mellas and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-09 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the liturgical experience of emotions in Byzantium through the hymns of Romanos the Melodist, Andrew of Crete and Kassia. It reimagines the performance of their hymns during Great Lent and Holy Week in Constantinople. In doing so, it understands compunction as a liturgical emotion, intertwined with paradisal nostalgia, a desire for repentance and a wellspring of tears. For the faithful, liturgical emotions were embodied experiences that were enacted through sacred song and mystagogy. The three hymnographers chosen for this study span a period of nearly four centuries and had an important connection to Constantinople, which forms the topographical and liturgical nexus of the study. Their work also covers three distinct genres of hymnography: kontakion, kanon and sticheron idiomelon. Through these lenses of period, place and genre this study examines the affective performativity hymns and the Byzantine experience of compunction.
Download or read book The Author in Middle Byzantine Literature written by Aglae Pizzone and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2014-10-24 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Author and authorship have become increasingly important concepts in Byzantine literary studies. This volume provides the first comprehensive survey on strategies of authorship in Middle Byzantine literature and investigates the interaction between self-presentation and cultural production in a wide array of genres, providing new insights into how Byzantine intellectuals conceived of their own work and pursuits.
Download or read book Dreams and Divination from Byzantium to Baghdad 400 1000 CE written by Bronwen Neil and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-14 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did dreams matter to Jews, Byzantine Christians, and Muslims in the first millennium? Dreams and Divination from Byzantium to Baghdad, 400 - 1000 CE shows how the ability to interpret dreams universally attracted power and influence in the first millennium. In a time when prophetic dreams were viewed as God's intervention in human history, male and female prophets wielded was unparalleled power in imperial courts, military camps, and religious gatherings. The three faiths drew on the ancient Near Eastern tradition of dream key manuals, which offer an insight into the hopes and fears of ordinary people. They melded pagan dream divination with their own scriptural traditions to produce a novel and rich culture of dream interpretation. Prophetic dreams enabled communities to understand their past and present circumstances as divinely ordained and helped to bolster the spiritual authority of dreamers and those who had the gift of interpreting their dreams. Bronwen Neil takes a gendered approach to the analysis of the common culture of dream interpretation across late antique Jewish, Byzantine, and Islamic sources to 1000 CE, in order to expose the ways in which dreams offered women a unique opportunity to exercise influence. The epilogue to the volume reveals why dreams still matter today to many men and women of the monotheist traditions.
Download or read book The Occult Sciences in Byzantium written by Paul Magdalino and published by La Pomme d'or. This book was released on 2006 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume represents the first attempt to examine occult sciences as a distinct category of Byzantine intellectual culture. It is concerned with both the reality and the image of the occult sciences in Byzantium, and seeks, above all, to represent them in their social and cultural context as a historical phenomenon. The eleven essays demonstrate that Byzantium was not marginal to the scientific culture of the Middle Ages, and that the occult sciences were not marginal to the learned culture of the medieval Byzantine world.
Download or read book Christians Shaping Identity from the Roman Empire to Byzantium written by Geoffrey Dunn and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-07-14 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christians Shaping Identity explores different ways in which Christians constructed their own identity and that of the society around them to the 12th century C.E. It also illustrates how modern readings of that past continue to shape Christian identity.
Download or read book Rhetoric in Byzantium written by Elizabeth Jeffreys and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Rhetoric in Byzantium' explores the ways in which rhetoric functioned in Byzantine society - as a tool for the effective communication of ideas and ideologies, but at times also a barrier that inhibited the expression of real feelings and everyday realities, and imposed a burden of decoding on outsiders. After an introduction on the practical and textual background to Byzantine rhetoric, the essays are grouped in five sections. The first two deal with the basis of rhetoric in Byzantium and its public uses, principally in imperial and ecclesiastical ceremonial. The next sections look at how rhetoric affects the definition of literature in a Byzantine context and the aesthetic to be used in approaching Byzantine literature, with reference to current critical approaches, and specifically at the role of rhetoric in the writing of history - does it only obscure the facts, or does the rhetorical process itself provide information at other levels? The final essays examine the interaction of the written word and pictorial representation and the question of whether real connections between rhetorical training and artistic production can be demonstrated.
Download or read book Military Saints in Byzantium and Rus 900 1200 written by Monica White and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-21 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rulers of the Byzantine Empire and its commonwealth were protected both by their own soldiers and by a heavenly army: the military saints. The transformation of Saints George, Demetrios, Theodore and others into the patrons of imperial armies was one of the defining developments of religious life under the Macedonian emperors. This book provides a comprehensive study of military sainthood and its roots in late antiquity. The emergence of the cults is situated within a broader social context, in which mortal soldiers were equated with martyrs and martyrs of the early Church recruited to protect them on the battlefield. Dr White then traces the fate of these saints in early Rus, drawing on unpublished manuscripts and other under-utilised sources to discuss their veneration within the princely clan and their influence on the first native saints of Rus, Boris and Gleb, who eventually joined the ranks of their ancient counterparts.
Download or read book The Secrets We Keep written by Roland Betancourt and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2024-08-06 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An intriguing look at secrecy during the Byzantine Empire and the role of the art historian in seeking truth. Secrecy has played a role throughout human history and continues to capture the popular imagination. Some of the most seductive aspects of the Byzantine Empire—such as the relics of the imperial palace and the military uses of Greek fire—have been shrouded in mystery for centuries. This book provides a brief history of secrecy in Byzantium and examines the role of the art historian in uncovering the truth, demonstrating how visual evidence can not only reveal new findings but also purposely conceal answers. Art historians face many challenges in their search for hidden knowledge, including accessing accounts preserved in fragmentary glimpses and reconciling how practices of speculation and reconstruction result in different, and sometimes contradictory, understandings. With pressing urgency, this book asks scholars to consider their role in articulating the stories of marginalized people, particularly for queer and trans history. At the core of these investigations is the quest to discover how clandestine knowledge was transmitted and how relationships were strengthened by collective secret keeping, as well as how concealment is used as a strategy for exercising power. With insights into the religious, imperial, military, and cultural uses of secrecy, this book offers an intriguing look at the ways secrecy manifested itself during the Byzantine Empire and the implications it has for the issues we face today.
Download or read book Reading in the Byzantine Empire and Beyond written by Teresa Shawcross and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-04 with total page 745 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering a comprehensive introduction to the history of books, readers and reading in the Byzantine Empire and its sphere of influence, this volume addresses a paradox. Advanced literacy was rare among imperial citizens, being restricted by gender and class. Yet the state's economic, religious and political institutions insisted on the fundamental importance of the written record. Starting from the materiality of codices, documents and inscriptions, the volume's contributors draw attention to the evidence for a range of interactions with texts. They examine the role of authors, compilers and scribes. They look at practices such as the close perusal of texts in order to produce excerpts, notes, commentaries and editions. But they also analyse the social implications of the constant intersection of writing with both image and speech. Showcasing current methodological approaches, this collection of essays aims to place a discussion of Byzantium within the mainstream of medieval textual studies.
