| Reports by SPBS Members |
Conferences
held in 2009 |
BYZANTIUM IN LONDON This public seminar was held at the Hellenic Centre in London on 28 February. Attended by some forty people, it explored the links between Byzantium and London by investigating the ways in which the two societies interacted in the past and by exploring the reminders, remnants and reflections of Byzantium that can be found in London today. The five talks delivered during the day approached that task from different angles. Anthea Harris of the University of Birmingham looked at Byzantine artefacts that have been found in datable contexts in London and the Thames valley. While the evidence from London itself is sparse, finds from burials both to the north and south of the Thames suggest that Byzantine luxury objects were reaching Britain during the period c.450-c.650. Silver spoons and bronze bowls of Constantinopolitan manufacture have been found interred in high-status graves such as that recently excavated at Prittlewell, Essex. Scot McKendrick, Head of Western Manuscripts at the British Library, described some of the Byzantine manuscripts in the library’s collection and how they came to be there. He ended with a description of the BL’s Codex Sinaiticus online project, which is making the text of the oldest complete copy of the New Testament available on the internet. Dr Jonathan Harris |
42nd SPRING SYMPOSIUM OF BYZANTINE STUDIES The XLII Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Wonderful Things: Byzantium through its art, took place between March 20th - 22nd 2009 and was hosted jointly by King's College London and the Courtauld Institute of Art. The symposium and its theme were tied to the Royal Academy's exhibition, Byzantium 330-1453, curated by Robin Cormack and Maria Vassilaki, which closed the day after the conclusion of the Symposium. Delegates to the Symposium were afforded a Private View of the exhibition on the Saturday night, and we are grateful to Alison Bracker from the RA for all her work in making this happen. The themes of the symposium reflected the exhibition. The opening section was designed to set the scene and to introduce issues around the display and discussion of Byzantine art. Subsequent sessions went on to cover specific objects or classes of object from within the exhibition - enamels, textiles, bronzes, for example - and to deal with the ways in which Byzantium has been exhibited, with papers covering a variety of past Byzantine exhibitions, and concluding with the curators of Byzantium on some of the issues surrounding their exhibition. Communications were also focused very much around objects from the exhibition. Here again, a wide range of material was explored, from ivories and manuscripts to metalwork and book-binding. A session was also devoted to 'non-exhibition' themes. The Symposiarchs, Antony Eastmond and Liz James, would like to thank all of those involved in the Symposium, particularly Ingrid Guiot at the |
SAILING FROM BYZANTIUM Conference Organisers: Vera Andriopoulou (University of Birmingham), Dr Mary B. Cunningham (University of Nottingham), and Dr Fotini Kondyli (Dumbarton Oaks) This conference took place and was well attended both by the speakers and by approximately twenty participants. We were delighted that the papers were, without exception, well focused on the topic and that the discussions they provoked were lively and illuminating. Because of the relatively small size of the conference, the atmosphere was relaxed and friendly. It was clear that many participants felt free to join in the discussions and to offer comments and questions on the papers. The conference opened with a paper by Dr Mary Cunningham on the background of the Syropoulos Project, which she initiated as a text seminar for postgraduate studens, staff and other interested people at the University of Birmingham between January 2007 and April 2008. The work of the seminar resulted in a full translation, with commentary, of Sylvester Syropoulos’s Memoirs, Book IV. Two students, Vera Andriopoulou and Fotini Kondyli, subsequently created a web-site which not only displays the full English translation, with commentary, but also provides background on the historical, geographical, archaeological, theological and other issues that are raised in the text. Dr Cunningham went on to discuss briefly Sylvester Syropoulos’s background and outlook as author of the text. As a delegate to the council of Ferrara-Florence (1438-39) who signed the decree of union but later recanted, Syropoulos interprets the proceedings of the council with considerable cynicism; his account should therefore be assessed in conjunction with the extant Greek and Latin Acts of the council since it differs considerably in many details from those accounts. Dr Cunningham also emphasised, for the benefit of this conference, the importance of Syropoulos’s Memoirs for historians, art historians, theologians, and archaeologists. One of the purposes of this conference was to bring together a group of international scholars who have interests in these various fields, in order to explore the interdisciplinary aspects of this text. The next main paper was delivered by Professor Elizabeth Zachariadou, of the University of Crete, on the topic, ‘The perils of the papacy’. Prof Zachariadou proceeded to give us an extremely illuminating account of the Ottoman Turks’ view of the council of Ferrara-Florence, employing especially an anonymous fifteenth-century Turkish chronicle. The Ottomans disapproved of the emperor John VIII Palaeologos’s decision to travel to Italy and hoped that the proposed union would not succeed. Having, by the beginning of the fifteenth century, conquered most of Asia Minor and the Balkans, the Ottomans nevertheless feared another crusade from Western Christendom. They hoped that Christians would remain in schism, thereby making the final conquest of Constantinople an easier objective. Prof Zachariadou caused the members of the seminar, as well as the other conference participants, to think not just about the encounter between Latins and Greeks that occurred in 1438, but also about the wider issue of relations between Christians and the Muslim Turks thoughout the fifteenth century. The second session of the conference, entitled ‘Logistics of the journey of the Byzantine delegation from Constantinople to Venice’, included papers by Dr Kondyli, who spoke about the travel arrangements for the trip by sea from Constantinople to Venice, and by Vera Andriopoulou, who considered the political and ecclesiastical background in the decades leading up to the council of Ferrara-Florence. These two papers complemented each other well, allowing participants to gain a concrete sense of the logistical and political arrangements that were necessary before the voyage and council could take place. Dr Nikos Kontogiannis, from the ephoria of Boeotia in Greece, also gave an illuminating paper on one of the stops that the delegation made in the course of the voyage and which Sylvester Syropoulos describes in his Memoirs. Dr Kontogiannis directs the archaeological investigation of the city of Negroponte in Boeotia and, as a consequence, was able to show the conference the latest finds and evidence of Venetian colonisation of the city after 1204. The third session, entitled ‘Venice, Ferrara and the Byzantines in 1438; issues of authority’, featured firstly Dr Trevor Dean, of Roehampton University, who spoke to us about the political and economic background in Ferrara, both prior to and during the stay of the Orthodox delegation in the summer and autumn of 1438. He explained the strained relationship between the city council and the Marquis of Ferrara, and the straitened economic circumstances which made the hosting of the Greeks so difficult. This provided us with another side of the story, which balances Syropoulos’s complaints about the uncomfortable lodgings and lack of money which the Greeks experienced during their stay in Ferrara. Dr Dean’s long-running study of documents and letters belonging to the archives of Ferrara enabled him to give an illuminating account of the part played by the Marquis and the city council in this affair. Unfortunately, Dr Fabio Barry, of the University of St Andrews, was forced to cancel and thus was unable to follow this up with a similar study of Venice, where the delegation had stayed first on their arrival in Italy. Dr Richard Price, speaking on ‘Precedence and papal primacy’, then attempted to make us aware of the Latin view of the Greeks and the special dispensations (such as waiving the obligation to kiss his foot) that the Pope made when he received them in Ferrara. This account of the dynamics between the Orthodox and Catholic parties provided an interesting corrective to the undoubtedly biased account of Sylvester Syropoulos. In the fourth session of the conference, we turned our attention to the cultural encounter that occurred at the council in 1438-39. Prof Annemarie Weyl Carr, inspired by Syropoulos’s statement that the Greeks refused to venerate the Latins’ religious paintings because they contained no inscriptions, provided us with an immensely learned and corrective commentary. Using examples of contemporary Italian, Cretan, and Cypriote art, including many icons, she showed just how much mutual influence was in fact occurring in this period. Far from being unable to recognise images of holy figures such as Christ and the Virgin Mary in Western art, it is likely that the Greeks would have had no trouble understanding Western art. Here again, we were reminded of Syropoulos’s tendentious, although always illuminating, approach to the subject of the cultural encounter between East and West. In the final full paper of the conference, Eirini Panou discussed Syropoulos’s descriptions of colour throughout his Memoirs. We had noted in the seminar that this author takes a lively interest in material objects, describing the decoration of many of the Western ships, for example, in detail. Ms Panou compared Syropoulos’s use of words relating to colour with that of other Byzantine authors and concluded that his vocabulary is wider than most. The vivid descriptions of textiles, paintings, and other decorative objects make this an important literary source for art historians and scholars of material culture. The final session of the conference was devoted to general discussion, followed by a presentation by Vera Andriopoulou and Fotini Kondyli on the future of the project and of the web-site. Plans for publication of the full translation, with commentary, and for the proceedings of this conference were broached. We were pleased by the level of support and interest in the project expressed by many participants. Their suggestions for future avenues of research, comparative work, and ongoing discussion were helpful and illuminating. Above all, it was felt that this conference had helped to focus the attention of scholars and students on Sylvester Syropoulos’s Memoirs, as well as on the political, ecclesiastical and cultural background of the mid-fifteenth century. Work on the text will continue and a publisher for the proceedings of the conference has already been found. The conference organisers would like to express again their gratitude to the Roberts Foundation, the Royal Historical Society, and the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies, all of which helped to make this gathering possible. Mary B. Cunningham (Dr) |
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