Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, volume 48, issue 1 (April 2024).

CONTENTS INCLUDE

SEEING THROUGH BYZANTIUM: PAPERS IN HONOUR OF LESLIE BRUBAKER

Building women's social capital in Late Antique Egypt: business owners and civic administrators
Anna C. Kelley 

Women as a social category have been the subject of numerous recent studies considering their lived experience in the Late Antique and Byzantine Mediterranean. However, their representation in the narrative sources continues to shape modern reconstructions of women's agency within their social and economic contexts, often with unsatisfactory results. Building on the twentieth-century sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's model of social capital, this article will use the documentary papyri from Egypt to suggest a paradigm in which the agency of individual women can be viewed and incorporated into micro-historical narratives of the patriarchal society of Late Antiquity.

‘The sublime objects of liminality’: the Byzantine insular-coastal koine and its administration in the passage from Late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages (ca. 600–ca. 850)
Luca Zavagno 

This paper focuses on the historical development and dynamics of political and administrative structures in regions of a fragmented empire that cannot be simply described as marginal ‘mouseholes’. Rather, it should be acknowledged that these spaces were part and parcel of a wider area (the Byzantine insular and coastal koine), which encompassed coastal areas as well as insular communities promoting socio-economic contact and cultural interchange. More importantly, they also boasted a peculiar set of material indicators suggesting a certain common cultural unity and identity. The koine coincided with liminal territories and the seas on which the Byzantine Empire retained political and naval rulership. Such liminal territories showed varied – yet coherent– administrative infrastructures and political practices on the part of local elites.

Holy icon or sacred body? The image of the emperor in the iconoclastic controversy
Maria Cristina Carile 

Throughout Iconoclasm the imperial icon was used in iconophile writings as the major argument in support of icon veneration. It included images of the emperor reproduced in various media and even panel portraits. Although the latter have not survived, they were real objects with a strong presence in the Byzantine system of visual communication. This paper will show that that the role of the imperial icon in Byzantine imagery and image theory was closely connected to the perception of the emperor and of the sacred imperial power in Byzantium.

The Preacher and the King: vision and meaning in Atheniensis 211
Kallirroe Linardou 

Codex Atheniensis 211 is the earliest surviving illustrated Chrysostomic anthology. Its unique and sophisticated illustration still puzzles and fascinates scholars. The relative chronology of the manuscript fluctuates between the end of the ninth century and the first half of the tenth, while its provenance remains to this day unspecified. In an attempt to illuminate the circumstances of its creation, this study engages with the examination of a unique homily and its illustration. In my view, the people responsible for the selection of the sermon and the design of its illustration conceived it as a meaningful re-contextualization of the homily's original delivery; the historical background of fifth-century Constantinople served as a springboard for the articulation of an eloquent visual comment on current public issues in the Byzantine capital.

A change of heart? Theophilos on his deathbed
Eirini Panou 

This article examines the last moments of the emperor Theophilos and how his dying moments are related in Byzantine historiography. His religious policy is central here. In fact, Theophilos’ stance on images is what allows us today to categorize narratives of his final moments, based on whether he repented for his iconoclastic policy. Three groups of narratives can be distinguished; those that claim that the emperor repented, those that claim that he did not, and those that are silent on the issue. Death narratives in historical writing constitute a commonplace in Kaiserkritik, and Theophilos’ dying moments are no exception.

Art and female agency in late Byzantium: three methodological case studies.
Andrea Mattiello 

This essay employs the anthropological notion of female social agency to analyse a selection of case studies in the art history of the late Byzantine Empire. They concern three women – Nicoletta Grioni, Isabelle de Lusignan, and Maria d'Enghien-Brienne – who lived between the mid- to late fourteenth century and the first half of the fifteenth. All three were part of a Greek-Latin Mediterranean socio-cultural context. While their stories are not fully represented in textual primary sources, the present essay examines a selection of heterogeneous visual and cultural materials that help to reinstate their role in history and overcome the male-logocentric nature of the written evidence related to them.

Seeing Byzantium through Edwin Freshfield's eyes: Arts and Crafts, antiquarianism, and learned societies at the end of the nineteenth century
Flavia Vanni and Jessica Varsallona 

This article focuses on three Byzantine capitals acquired by Edwin Freshfield and later donated to the church of the Wisdom of God in Lower Kingswood, which provide us with two ways to see through Byzantium. The first looks at their original Constantinopolitan context lost at the time of their acquisition. The second reflects on how Byzantine materials attracted wealthy Western European collectors, who combined antiquarian curiosity with the quest for the authentic Christian faith. Their privileged status allowed them both to possess these witnesses of the sacred past and even to project their own image to posterity as being analogous to that of Byzantine patrons.