Download or read book Varieties of Monastic Experience in Byzantium 800 1453 written by Alice-Mary Talbot and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this unprecedented introduction to Byzantine monasticism, based on the Conway Lectures she delivered at the University of Notre Dame in 2014, Alice-Mary Talbot surveys the various forms of monastic life in the Byzantine Empire between the ninth and fifteenth centuries. It includes chapters on male monastic communities (mostly cenobitic, but some idiorrhythmic in late Byzantium), nuns and nunneries, hermits and holy mountains, and a final chapter on alternative forms of monasticism, including recluses, stylites, wandering monks, holy fools, nuns disguised as monks, and unaffiliated monks and nuns. This original monograph does not attempt to be a history of Byzantine monasticism but rather emphasizes the multiplicity of ways in which Byzantine men and women could devote their lives to service to God, with an emphasis on the tension between the two basic modes of monastic life, cenobitic and eremitic. It stresses the individual character of each Byzantine monastic community in contrast to the monastic orders of the Western medieval world, and yet at the same time demonstrates that there were more connections between certain groups of monasteries than previously realized. The most original sections include an in-depth analysis of the challenges facing hermits in the wilderness, and special attention to enclosed monks (recluses) and urban monks and nuns who lived independently outside of monastic complexes. Throughout, Talbot highlights some of the distinctions between the monastic life of men and women, and makes comparisons of Byzantine monasticism with its Western medieval counterpart.
Download or read book Studies in Byzantine Monasticism written by Alice-Mary Talbot and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-10-02 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume includes seventeen essays on Byzantine monasticism, focusing on the 9th to 15th centuries. Envisaged as a companion Variorum volume to Talbot's Women and Religious Life in Byzantium (2001), this compendium complements its predecessor by focusing more attention on male monasteries, hermits and holy mountains, while offering some pioneering studies of female patrons, rural nuns, and the links of many Byzantine women to Mount Athos. The volume also complements Talbot's 2019 monograph, Varieties of Monastic Experience in Byzantium, 800-1453, by offering detailed analyses of topics that could only be briefly addressed in that book. Introductory essays include an overview of the historical development of Byzantine monasteries and holy mountains, emphasising the intertwining of monasticism with urban and rural society. Subsequent essays explore the regimen at coenobitic monasteries, while paying considerable attention to the less well-known lifestyles of hermits, especially those on holy mountains. Other topics include monastery gardens and horticulture; the culture of the refectory; challenges for adolescent novices; factors influencing the choice of a monastery’s foundation site; female patronage of monastery construction and restoration; the conversion of monasteries from male to female and vice-versa; rules regarding personal poverty for monastics; and the choice of a monastic name.
Download or read book Holiness on the Move Mobility and Space in Byzantine Hagiography written by Mihail Mitrea and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-12-30 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Holiness on the Move: Mobility and Space in Byzantine Hagiography explores the literary, religious, and social functions of monastic mobility in Byzantine hagiography, touching on aspects of space, narrative, and identity. The ten chapters included in this volume highlight the multifaceted and rich nature of travel narratives, exploring topics such as authorship and audience, narrative structure and function, identity-making and practicalities of and discourse on travel. In terms of geographical span, the case studies cover Constantinople and its hinterland, Asia Minor, mainland Greece, Trebizond, the Balkans, and southern Italy and range chronologically from the end of the sixth to the fourteenth century. The contributions offer novel insights and perspectives on the importance of mobility in the literary construction of holiness in the Byzantine world and the wider medieval Mediterranean, the spatial dimension of sacred mobility, and the ways in which mobility is employed in the narrative construction of hagiographical texts. As such, the volume joins the burgeoning research on sacred mobilities and will interest students and scholars of Byzantine and medieval literature, religion, and history, as well as a wider readership with an interest in the study of space and mobility.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Christian Monasticism written by Bernice M. Kaczynski and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 743 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Christian Monasticism addresses, for the first time in one volume, multiple strands of Christian monastic practice. Forty-four essays consider historical and thematic aspects of the Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Protestant, and Anglican traditions, as well as contemporary 'new monasticism'.
Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Gender and Sexuality in Byzantium written by Mati Meyer and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-05-23 with total page 549 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Handbook is the first to consider the interrelated subjects of gender and sexuality in the Eastern Roman Empire from an interdisciplinary perspective. Drawing on both modern theories and Byzantine perceptions, and considering multiple periods and religions (Eastern Orthodox, Islamic, and Jewish), it provides evidentiary textual and visual material support for an analysis of the two linked themes. Broadly, the essays demonstrate that gender and sexual constructs in Byzantium were porous. As a result, they expand our knowledge of not only how sex and gender were conceived and performed but also how ideas and practices shaped Byzantine life. The Routledge Handbook of Gender and Sexuality in Byzantium will be an indispensable guide for students and scholars of late antique and Byzantine religion, history, culture, and art, who will find it a useful critical survey of current scholarship and one that shines new light in their areas of research. The focus on issues of gender and sexuality may also be of interest to individuals concerned with Eastern Mediterranean culture, as well as to the broader public. Chapter 21 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
Download or read book Between Community and Seclusion written by Mirko Breitenstein and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 2021-04 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fact that certain cultures and religions produced a way of life which, for the sake of self-perfection, expected its adherents to withdraw from various obligations to the world and to enter into the organisational structure of a monastic community obviously represents a constant anthropological foundation. The spectrum of monastic life within these various cultures was extremely diverse in its manifestations. It was the result of a high degree of flexibility in the face of constantly changing ideas about piety, social needs and concepts of community and individuality. However, an interreligious study with the aim of a scholarly analysis of comparable key elements across different monastic cultures does not exist yet. The editors as well as the authors of this volume are particularly interested in how monastic life was realised communally in many ways according to fixed norms and rules, how it shaped the understanding of community and civilisation and therefore made a decisive contribution to the formation of our cultural identity.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Constantinople written by Sarah Bassett and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-17 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The collected essays explore late antique and Byzantine Constantinople in matters sacred, political, cultural, and commercial.
Download or read book The Virgin Mary in Byzantium c 400 1000 written by Mary B. Cunningham and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-09-08 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Virgin Mary assumed a position of central importance in Byzantium. This major and authoritative study examines her portrayal in liturgical texts during the first six centuries of Byzantine history. Focusing on three main literary genres that celebrated this holy figure, it highlights the ways in which writers adapted their messages for different audiences. Mary is portrayed variously as defender of the imperial city, Constantinople, virginal Mother of God, and ascetic disciple of Christ. Preachers, hymnographers, and hagiographers used rhetoric to enhance Mary's powerful status in Eastern Christian society, depicting her as virgin and mother, warrior and ascetic, human and semi-divine being. Their paradoxical statements were based on the fundamental mystery that Mary embodied: she was the mother of Christ, the Word of God, who provided him with the human nature that he assumed in his incarnation. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Download or read book The Late Byzantine Romance in Context written by Ioannis Smarnakis and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-04-23 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Sources for Byzantine Art History Volume 3 The Visual Culture of Later Byzantium 1081 c 1350 written by Foteini Spingou and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-21 with total page 1683 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book the beauty and meaning of Byzantine art and its aesthetics are for the first time made accessible through the original sources. More than 150 medieval texts are translated from nine medieval languages into English, with commentaries from over seventy leading scholars. These include theories of art, discussions of patronage and understandings of iconography, practical recipes for artistic supplies, expressions of devotion, and descriptions of cities. The volume reveals the cultural plurality and the interconnectivity of medieval Europe and the Mediterranean from the late eleventh to the early fourteenth centuries. The first part uncovers salient aspects of Byzantine artistic production and its aesthetic reception, while the second puts a spotlight on particular ways of expressing admiration and of interpreting of the visual.
Download or read book Spatialities of Byzantine Culture from the Human Body to the Universe written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-11-14 with total page 705 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Compensating a four-decades shortfall, this collective volume is the first reader in Byzantine spatial studies. It offers a diversity of topics and scientific approaches, articulated by up-to-date interdisciplinary dialogue, and reflects on the future challenges of Byzantine spatial studies.
Download or read book Byzantine Tree Life written by Thomas Arentzen and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-07-11 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the many ways Byzantines lived with their trees. It takes seriously theological and hagiographic tree engagement as expressions of that culture’s deep involvement—and even fascination—with the arboreal. These pages tap into the current attention paid to plants in a wide range of scholarship, an attention that involves the philosophy of plant life as well as scientific discoveries of how communicative trees may be, and how they defend themselves. Considering writings on and images of trees from Late Antiquity and medieval Byzantium sympathetically, the book argues for an arboreal imagination at the root of human aspirations to know and draw close to the divine.
Download or read book The Rich and the Pure written by Daniel Caner and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "As the Roman Empire broke down in western Europe, its stability and prosperity moved decisively to the east, producing history's first truly affluent, multi-faceted Christian society, in what is now known as the Byzantine Empire. What united the twenty-four million people living in this vast realm--Roman citizens all, but as diverse as the landscape itself--was a shared conviction in the Christian ideal of philanthrōpia. In this sweeping cultural and social history of Christian philanthropy, Daniel Caner shows this practice involved more than simply a love of humanity; it required living up to Jesus's injunction to 'Give to all who ask of you' by offering mercy and material aid to every human being, whatever their origin or status. Yet this commitment to the common good arose in an aristocratic society marked by sharp gradations of rank and privilege and dominated by an official church experiencing explosive growth and unprecedented affluence. In tracking the evolution of distinctive ideals and modes of Christian giving over three centuries, Caner brings to the fore the people of Byzantium, from the countryside to the lower levels of urban society to the elites, and the complex, hierarchical relationships that these gifts fostered among them. Drawing on an immense range of evidence, The Rich and the Pure offers nothing less than a portrait of the whole of early Byzantine society"--
Download or read book Rulers and Rulership in the Arc of Medieval Europe 1000 1200 written by Christian Raffensperger and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-08-24 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rulers and Rulership in the Arc of Medieval Europe challenges the dominant paradigm of what rulership is and who rulers are by decentering the narrative and providing a broad swath of examples from throughout medieval Europe. Within that territory, the prevalent idea of monarchy and kingship is overturned in favor of a broad definition of rulership. This book will demonstrate to the reader that the way in which medieval Europe has been constructed in both the popular and scholarly imaginations is incorrect. Instead of a king we have multiple rulers, male and female, ruling concurrently. Instead of an independent church or a church striving for supremacy under the Gregorian Reform, we have a pope and ecclesiastical leaders making deals with secular rulers and an in-depth interconnection between the two. Finally, instead of a strong centralizing polity growing into statehood we see weak rulers working hand in glove with weak subordinates to make the polity as a whole function. Medievalists, Byzantinists, and Slavists typically operate in isolation from one another. They do not read each other’s books, or engage with each other’s work. This book requires engagement from all of them to point out that the medieval Europe that they work in is one and the same and demands collaboration to best understand it.
Download or read book The Library of Paradise written by David A. Michelson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-13 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemplative reading is a spiritual practice developed by Christian monks in sixth- and seventh-century Mesopotamia. Mystics belonging to the Church of the East pursued a form of contemplation which moved from reading, to meditation, to prayer, to the ecstasy of divine vision. The Library of Paradise tells the story of this Syriac tradition in three phases: its establishment as an ascetic practice, the articulation of its theology, and its maturation and spread. The sixth-century monastic reform of Abraham of Kashkar codified the essential place of reading in East Syrian ascetic life. Once established, the practice of contemplative reading received extensive theological commentary. Abraham's successor Babai the Great drew upon the ascetic system of Evagrius of Pontus to explain the relationship of reading to the monk's pursuit of God. Syriac monastic handbooks of the seventh century built on this Evagrian framework. 'Enanisho' of Adiabene composed an anthology called Paradise that would stand for centuries as essential reading matter for Syriac monks. Dadisho' of Qatar wrote a widely copied commentary on the Paradise. Together, these works circulated as a one-volume library which offered readers a door to "Paradise" through contemplation. The Library of Paradise is the first book-length study of East Syrian contemplative reading. It adapts methodological insights from prior scholarship on reading, including studies on Latin lectio divina. By tracing the origins of East Syrian contemplative reading, this study opens the possibility for future investigation into its legacies, including the tradition's long reception history in Sogdian, Arabic, and Ethiopic monastic libraries.
Download or read book Unrivalled Influence written by Judith Herrin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-11 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the exceptional roles that women played in the vibrant cultural and political life of medieval Byzantium. Drawing on a diverse range of sources, this title focuses on the importance of marriage in imperial statecraft, the tense coexistence of empresses in the imperial court, and the critical relationships of mothers and daughters.
Download or read book Don t Think for Yourself written by Peter Adamson and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2022-10-15 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do we judge whether we should be willing to follow the views of experts or whether we ought to try to come to our own, independent views? This book seeks the answer in medieval philosophical thought. In this engaging study into the history of philosophy and epistemology, Peter Adamson provides an answer to a question as relevant today as it was in the medieval period: how and when should we turn to the authoritative expertise of other people in forming our own beliefs? He challenges us to reconsider our approach to this question through a constructive recovery of the intellectual and cultural traditions of the Islamic world, the Byzantine Empire, and Latin Christendom. Adamson begins by foregrounding the distinction in Islamic philosophy between taqlīd, or the uncritical acceptance of authority, and ijtihād, or judgment based on independent effort, the latter of which was particularly prized in Islamic law, theology, and philosophy during the medieval period. He then demonstrates how the Islamic tradition paves the way for the development of what he calls a “justified taqlīd,” according to which one develops the skills necessary to critically and selectively follow an authority based on their reliability. The book proceeds to reconfigure our understanding of the relation between authority and independent thought in the medieval world by illuminating how women found spaces to assert their own intellectual authority, how medieval writers evaluated the authoritative status of Plato and Aristotle, and how independent reasoning was deployed to defend one Abrahamic faith against the other. This clear and eloquently written book will interest scholars in and enthusiasts of medieval philosophy, Islamic studies, Byzantine studies, and the history of thought.
