Late Byzantium Reconsidered

Late Byzantium Reconsidered offers a unique collection of essays analysing the artistic achievements of Mediterranean centres linked to the Byzantine Empire between 1261, when the Palaiologan dynasty re-conquered Constantinople, and the decades after 1453, when the Ottomans took the city, marking the end of the Empire. These centuries were characterised by the rising of socio-political elites, in regions such as Crete, Italy, Laconia, Serbia, and Trebizond, that, while sharing cultural and artistic values influenced by the Byzantine Empire, were also developing innovative and original visual and cultural standards. The comparative and interdisciplinary framework offered by this volume aims to challenge established ideas concerning the late Byzantine period such as decline, renewal, and innovation. By examining specific case studies of cultural production from within and outside Byzantium, the chapters in this volume highlight the intrinsic innovative nature of the socio-cultural identities active in the late medieval and early modern Mediterranean vis-à-vis the rhetorical assumption of the cultural contraction of the Byzantine Empire.

Investigates the political and spiritual agenda behind monumental paintings of Christ's miracles in late Byzantine churches.

Byzantium in Eastern European Visual Culture in the Late Middle Ages focuses on how the heritage of Byzantium was continued and transformed alongside local developments in the artistic and cultural traditions of Eastern Europe between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries.

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.

This volume publishes twelve papers that were delivered at an academic symposium held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, on April 16-18, 2004, in conjunction with the exhibition, "Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261-1557)" (held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from March 23 to July 5, 2004).

This volume builds upon the new worldwide interest in the global Middle Ages. It investigates the prismatic heritage and eclectic artistic production of Eastern Europe between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, while challenging the temporal and geographical parameters of the study of medieval, Byzantine, post-Byzantine, and early-modern art. Contact and interchange between primarily the Latin, Greek, and Slavic cultural spheres resulted in local assimilations of select elements that reshaped the artistic landscapes of regions of the Balkan Peninsula, the Carpathian Mountains, and further north. The specificities of each region, and, in modern times, politics and nationalistic approaches, have reinforced the tendency to treat them separately, preventing scholars from questioning whether the visual output could be considered as an expression of a shared history. The comparative and interdisciplinary framework of this volume provides a holistic view of the visual culture of these regions by addressing issues of transmission and appropriation, as well as notions of cross-cultural contact, while putting on the global map of art history the eclectic artistic production of Eastern Europe.

The centuries-long economic and military decline of the Byznatine Empire, which culminated in its political disappearance as a state in 1459, was, paradoxically, accompanied by high levels of cultural achievement. Aimed at broadening our understanding of the final phase of the empire, this collection explores how Byzantine ideological, spiritual, and artistic traditions transcending the economic and political realities of the time. The papers, delivered at an interdisciplinary colloquium held in May 1989 at Princeton University, deal with hagiographic, monastic, literary, architectural, and artistic questions, as well as the general cultural and social issues, of this fascinating period. Along with the editors, the contributors are Smilkjka Gabelic, Thalia Gouma-Peterson, Angela Hero, Robert Ousterhout, Marcus Rautman, Steven Reinert, Alice Mary Talbot, SPeros Vryonis, and John J. Yiannias. Slobodan Curcic is Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. Doula Mouriki teaches at the Technical University of Athens. Publications of the Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

It has long been noted that the prestige and power of the church were steadily growing in the period of the late Byzantine empire, a tendency that was complex, multifaceted, and sometimes ambivalent. The essays in this collection seek to shed light on various aspects of the church's role in late Byzantine society, especially on the relationship between the church and the lay world and the response of individuals to the challenges faced by Orthodoxy. The volume is divided into three sections: (1) Politics, Society, and the Economy; (2) Intellectual Life and Ideology; and (3) The Church and the Turkish Conquests. By exploring these different areas, the essays in this volume contribute to scholarly understanding of how the church was embedded into the fabric of late Byzantine society and intellectual life.