Byzantium from Below
12th-14th April 2025
Saturday 12th April
0930-0945: Welcome from symposiarch
0945-1030: Keynote: Sharon Gerstel (UCLA), “Seeing villages over time: case studies from rural Greece”
1030-1100: Tea and coffee
Session 1: Documented Lives
1100-1125: Matthew Kinloch (Oslo), “Non-elite characters in late Byzantine history writing”
1125-1150: Dora Konstantellou (Dumbarton Oaks), “When is a rural painter identified by name? Reading representations of painters in late Byzantine/medieval rural societies”
1150-1200 Milan Vukašinović (Uppsala), “Collective subjectivity in the Athonite archives”
1200-1210 Nikolas Hächler (Zurich), “The Dialogus de scientia politica: an anonymous comment on and critique of the early Byzantine state under Justinian I” (Communication)
1210-1230: Questions
1230-1400: Lunch
Session 2: Law, Land and Property
1400-1425: Arietta Papaconstantinou (Aix-Marseilles) “Byzantine “tormented voices” from the edge of empire”
1425-1450: Jenny Cromwell (Manchester Metropolitan), “Patrons and property in rural Egypt in the early 8th century”
1450-1500 Franka Horvat (UCLA), “Islanders’ perspective: the case of the Elaphiti Archipelago” (Communication)
1500-1510 Thomas Laver (Cambridge), “Using tax registers to study labour relationships in the villages of Byzantine Egypt”
1510-1530: Questions
1530-1600: Tea and coffee
Session 3: Landscape and Settlement
1600-1625: Jim Crow (Edinburgh), “Rural settlement in the Cyclades: excavations at Kato Chora”
1625-1650: Archie Dunn (Birmingham) “From communal corvées to fiscal and communal enterprises in medieval Byzantium”
1650-1715: Sophia Germanidou (Hellenic Ministry of Culture), “Unseen, unheard and disregarded: tracing female labour in the Byzantine countryside through an interdisciplinary approach”
1715-1735: Georgios Makris (British Columbia), “Modest luxury? Rural cemeteries and grave goods in the Valley of Kalamas, Epiros”
1735-1800: Questions
1800-1900: Wine reception
Sunday 13th April
Session 4: Material Approaches and Labour
1000-1025: Flavia Vanni (Newcastle), “The contribution of rural artisans to Byzantine sacred spaces (11th-13th centuries)”
1025-1050: Sean Leatherbury (Dublin) “Craft labour and rural communities in the late antique east”
1050-1115: Anna Kelley (St Andrews), “Career opportunities: apprentice contracts and social networking in late antique workshops”
1115-1125: Zeynep Olgun (Cambridge), “Ships in villages: maritime labour in Byzantine society” (Communication)
1125-1135: Questions
1135-1200: Tea and coffee
Session 5: Social Life
1200-1225: Sophie Moore (Newcastle) “Title TBC”
1225-1250: Vicky Manopoulou (Durham), “Processing villages: litanic experiences of rural communities in Byzantium”
1250-1300: Rachael Helen Banes (Vienna), “Artisans or amateurs: who wrote the graffiti at late antique Aphrodisias?” (Communication)
1250-1310: Jacopo Dolci (Nottingham) “A Monument in Transition: The Artemision and the Evolving Urban Landscape of Late Antique Gerasa (c. 350–750)”
1310-1320: Questions
1330-1430 Lunch (SPBS Exec)
1430-1530: Communications
1) Irakli Tezelashvili (Courtauld), “Painted and adorned for the salvation of all of this valley: great and lesser’: Svan Churches of T’evdore, ‘the King’s Painter,’ Revisited”
2) Giuseppe Belsito (independent scholar), “The rural context in the Sicilian Theme (6th-8th centuries AD): an impoverished or a dynamic economic area within the overall Byzantine polity? Contradictory data emerging from recent archaeological excavations in Sicily”
3) Husamettin Simsir (Notre Dame), “Anthroponymic appellations, names, sobriquets, nicknames and titles of mid-15th-century post-Byzantine landholders in the Ottoman Balkans”
4) Nicolas Varaine (Paris), “Ordinary devotion in the late Byzantine world: looking for the modest donors of
Venetian Crete”
5) Bjarke Bach Christensen (Cambridge) New Ostraka Evidence for an Integrated Estate in Sixth-Century Byzantine North Africa
1530-1600: Tea and coffee
Session 6: Comparative perspectives
1600- 1630: Chris Wickham (Oxford) “The West’”
1630-1700: Hugh Kennedy (SOAS), “Slavery as a vehicle for social mobility in the early Islamic world”
1700-1730: Questions
1730-1830: Wine reception
1830-1930: Travel to feast
1930: Feast (Kolata Lounge, 1488 Pershore Rd, Bournville, Birmingham B30 2NT)
Monday 14th April
Session 7: Rural Life on Islands and Peripheries
0930-0955: Luca Zavagno (Bilkent), “‘From the gentle coast and where the stream descends from the grove of the river and all the high peaks there’. The countryside of large Byzantine islands in the early Middle Ages”
0955-1020: Basema Harmaneh (Vienna), “On peripheries: exploring the non-elite universe in the late antique Levant”
1020-1045: Angelo Castrorao Barba (Granada), “Living in the Sicilian countryside during the Byzantine-Islamic transition: archaeological perspectives”
1045-1100: Questions
1100-1130: Tea and coffee
1130-1200: AGM
1200-1230: Closing remarks by Stuart Pracy (Exeter) and Leslie Brubaker (Birmingham)
1230: Closing of the symposium and announcement of the next symposium