Byzantine News

Abstract: The Humboldt Chair of Digital Humanities at the University of Leipzig sees in the rise of Digital Technologies an opportunity to re-assess and re-establish how the humanities can advance the understanding of the past and to support a dialogue among civilizations. Philology, which uses surviving linguistic sources to understand the past as deeply and broadly as possible, is central to these tasks, because languages, present and historical, are central to human culture. To advance this larger effort, the Humboldt Chair focuses upon enabling Greco-Roman culture to realize the fullest possible role in intellectual life. --> Greco-Roman culture is particularly significant because it contributed to both Europe and the Islamic world and the study of Greco-Roman culture and its influence thus entails Classical Arabic as well as Ancient Greek and Latin. The Humboldt Chair inaugurates an Open Philology Project with three complementary efforts that produce open philological ...

Review from BMCR In this recent addition to the Variorum Collected Studies Series, Roger Scott grapples with Byzantine historiography and the age of Justinian. The papers contained therein are divided into four broad groupings: (A) Historiography, Chronicle and the Sixth Century; (B) Malalas, Theophanes and the Sixth Century; (C) Malalas, Theophanes and Their Byzantine Past; and (D) Reinterpreting the Fifth and Sixth Centuries. Scott, a Classicist by training, has devoted a good part of his career to the study of early Byzantine chronicles, with a particular emphasis on Malalas and Theophanes.1 Like other volumes in this series, the majority of the papers included were originally published elsewhere. Some of these come from hard to find publications such as Bysantinska Sälskapet Bulletin, a boon for scholars who might otherwise lack access to them. Some of the articles are over forty years old (X). On the other hand, two of the nineteen are published for the first time in this volu...

A new book in the series of Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Symposia and Colloquia The fourteen essays in Viewing the Morea focus on the late medieval Morea (Peloponnese), beginning with the bold attempt of Western knights to establish a kingdom on foreign soil. Reinserted into this tale of Crusader foundation are the large numbers of Orthodox villagers who shared the region and created their own narrative of an eternal and sacred empire generated by the pains of loss and the hopes of refoundation. Layered upon the historical and physical topography of the region are the traces of the Venetians, whose “right eye,” Modon, was located at the peninsula’s southwestern tip. How these groups interacted and how they asserted identity is at the center of inquiry in these essays. Also at the core of this study is the understanding of place and memory—the recollection of the ancient history of the Peloponnese, the architectural and cartographic marking of its mountains and valleys, the re-creation o...

Manuel I Komnenos and Michael Glycas: A Twelfth-Century Defence and Refutation of Astrology Manuel Komnenos I, Emperor of the Byzantine Empire composed a defence of astrology to the Church Fathers, in which he asserted that this discipline was compatible with Christian doctrine. Theologian Michael Glykas, possibly imprisoned and blinded by Manuel for political sedition, refuted this defence, claiming that the astrological art was heretical. This is the first time that this exchange of treatises has been translated into any language since their composition in the twelfth-century. The introduction sets these works into their historical framework, at a time when the belief in the validity of astrology was held by some of the best scholars of this century as a result of the flood of Arabic astrological translations coming into the Latin West and Greek East. The writings of these two antagonists precipitated anew in mediaeval thought the problem of the correct r...

Greco-Egyptian Alchemy in Byzantium The main concern of this paper will be with the problems raised by the reception of ancient alchemy in Byzantium. After a brief introduction, I will start from the study of a pre-Byzantine author, Zosimos of Panopolis, and deal with the following questions : How, from a purely material viewpoint, were Zosimos’ writings handed down during the Byzantine period? Did Byzantine alchemists have access to his works and did they resort to them? --> Was Zosimos known outside the alchemical Corpus; in other words, did Graeco Egyptian alchemists exert any kind of influence outside strictly alchemical circles? When and how was the alchemical Corpus put together? In a more general way, what evidence do we have, whether in the Corpus itself or in non-alchemical literature, that alchemy was practised in Byzantium? Answers (or at least partial answers) to these questions should help us to understand and define to some extent the p...

The art of creating mosaic patterns grew and developed with the rise of the Byzantine Empire in the 5th century. New characteristics appeared in mosaics with Eastern influences in style and the use of glass tesserae, known as smalti, sourced from northern Italy. This added new texture and life to the mosaic patterns being created, with the smalti, which were cut from thick sheets of colored glass and had a rough surface and tiny air bubbles throughout, being backed by reflective silver or gold leaf. --> The application of mosaics also changed; while the Romans favored the use of mosaic patterns for flooring, the Byzantines took the art further and applied them to walls and ceilings. They kept their smalti un-grouted to allow light to reflect and refract through them and set their pieces at slight angles to capture the play of light as it moved through the space and allow the silver or gold backing to sparkle from every angle. The mosaic patterns and themes melded togethe...

Catalogue of the Imperial Byzantine Coins in the British Museum By Warwick William Wroth , British Museum Dept . of Coins and Medals Published 1908. --> Catalog of Imperial Byzantine Coins in the British Museum - Vol I by