Strangers to Themselves: The Byzantine Outsider: Papers from the Thirty-Second Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, March 1998

by Smythe,Dion C.; Smythe,Dion C.

• ISBN13: 9780860788140
• ISBN10: 0860788148
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2016-09-21
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

March 1998 saw Byzantinists gathering together at the University of Sussex in Brighton, for the annual symposium held by the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies. Their aim was to consider the question of the 'Byzantine outsider'.Some categories of outsiders appear clear and simple: those marked out by class, race, sex, religion. But these categories are not universals. Today, historians of all periods are examining the ways in which we analyse the divisions in our societies, which can determine how we look at societies in the past. There is no consensus on who forms the 'outsider class' in modern society; it should come as no surprise that there was no consensus in Byzantium as to who the outsiders were, what they had done to deserve that status, and what the result of their attaining it should have been.The papers in this collection, drawn from the large number presented at the XXXII Spring Symposium, continue the debate about the idea of the 'Byzantine outsider'. The scholars within - theologians, historians, literary critics and art historians - present differing approaches to different aspects of the problem. The volume does not aim to have the 'last word', but rather to provoke debate and to open the field. Any examination of society that uses the concept of the outsider has implicitly within it a concept of the 'insider'. By looking at those on the margins it becomes easier to see who were - or at least thought they were - on the inside.

Table of Contents

Editor's Preface	vii
List of abbreviations	ix
List of Plates	x
The `Other' in Byzantium	1	(22)
Margaret Mullett
Aliens and Citizens of Elsewhere: Xeniteia in East Christian Monastic Literature	23	(16)
John McGuckin
Byzantine Asceticism -- a Stranger to the Church?	39	(8)
Janet Rutherford
Middle Byzantine `Tours of Hell' Outsider Theodicy?	47	(14)
Jane Baun
John of Phoberou: a Voice Crying in the Wilderness	61	(14)
Robert H. Jordan
The Hermit as Stranger in the Desert	75	(12)
Nancy Sevcenko
Exclues et alienees: les femmes dans la tradition canonique byzantine	87	(18)
Joelle Beaucamp
Hebrews, Greeks or Romans? Jewish Culture and Identity in Byzantium	105	(14)
Nicholas de Lange
The Enigma of the Romaniote (Jewish--Byzantine) Tombs	119	(10)
Hanna Jacobsohn
The Byzantine Outsider in Trade (c.900--c.1350)	129	(20)
David Jacoby
Constantinople and the Outside World	149	(14)
Paul Magdalino
Patron Imagery from the Fringes of the Empire	163	(16)
Lyn Rodley
The World of Fiction and the World `Out There': the Case of the Byzantine Novel	179	(10)
Roderick Beaton
Akritis and Outsiders	189	(14)
Elizabeth Jeffreys
Defining the Foreign in Kekaumenos	203	(12)
Charlotte Roueche
Procopius the Outsider?	215	(14)
Geoffrey Greatrex
Foreigners in Tenth-Century Byzantium: a Contribution to the History of Cultural Encounter	229	(16)
Liliana Simeonova
Byzantine Conceptions of Otherness after the Annexation of Bulgaria (1018)	245	(14)
Paul Stephenson
Afterword by an Art Historian	259	(6)
Robin Cormack
Index	265