56th Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies – Byzantium from below: rural and non-elite life in the Byzantine world
The Komnenian Restoration of Byzantium & its Legacy 22-24 May 2025 | Worcester College, University of Oxford & online
The Komnenian Restoration of Byzantium & its Legacy
22-24 May 2025 | Worcester College, University of Oxford & online
Scholars have used the concept of the ‘Komnenian Restoration’ of Byzantium for many years, and yet the term has never received a critical analysis: what did the Komnenoi believe they were restoring? Did they achieve any of their aims, in what ways, and what was the legacy of their successes and failures?
This workshop aims to gather both established and emerging Komnenian Scholars to analyse these questions, and to do so across all fields including cultural, religious, administrative, legal and societal history as well as miliary. Likewise, it will have an especial focus on the Komnenian legacy, both towards the Byzantine successor states of the 13th century, and also the Turkish and Latin polities that arose after their 12th century peak.
This symposium will also discuss the publication of a handbook of Komnenian scholars, and so welcome attendees who would also consider contributing to such a volume. This event will also involve associated cultural events, such as a workshop on Komnenian manuscripts in the Bodleian Library.
For more information and to register interest in attending, please fill in this online form by the 14th April 2025 – late contact will be considered, but the event may have reached capacity by then.
56th Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies: Symposium Information
The Byzantine Empire was built on the backs of the rural and urban labour force. From agricultural production and the extraction of raw materials to the physical construction of urban centres and buildings, the strength of the empire’s economy and its imperial administration rested upon complex networks of labourers, artisans and ‘local notables’, across its natural landscapes, in villages, and cities. While huge advances have been made in studying labour processes in recent years, the experiences of such populations within the Byzantine world have received comparatively less attention when compared to other fields of late Roman and western medieval studies. How the Byzantine Empire was experienced and understood by those far removed from its centres of governance and central networks of power, are crucial questions for understanding the lived experience of the mostly silent majority whose lives played out both within, and around, the empire’s fluctuating ‘borders’. Beyond exploring the contribution of rural communities and non-elites to modes of production, this symposium will also explore what can be said of the intricacies of their lives, societies, and what it meant to ‘be Byzantine’, viewed from below.
Symposiarch
Dr Daniel Reynolds
Cost
Full three days:
- Members of SPBS – £95
- Non-members – £110
- Students/ unwaged: – £50
One day:
- Members of SPBS – £55
- Non-members – £65
- Students/ unwaged – £30
Symposium Feast
Sunday 13 April 1930 (Kolkata Lounge Restaurant) – £40 per head
Online:
- Members: £20
- Non-members: £35
- Students/unwaged: £10
Venue
The University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT, United Kingdom
The Symposium will be hosted in the Arts Building on the University of Birmingham’s main campus (map reference R16): https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/documents/university/edgbaston-campus-map.pdf
An interactive map can be accessed here: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/contact/directions
Getting to campus
Train
The University of Birmingham has its own train station known as ‘University’. Trains leave every 10-15 mins from Birmingham New Street Station, usually departing from platform 11B.
Further details on train travel: https://intranet.birmingham.ac.uk/student/travelling-to-campus/travelling-by-train.aspx
Information on National Rail Services: https://www.nationalrail.co.uk/
It may be possible to get cheaper tickets, especially for longer-distance rail travel within the UK, here: https://www.thetrainline.com/
By bus
Local routes 61, 63, 41, 48, 76, X21, X22, 19, 20, 20A directly serve the University of Birmingham campus, linking the university to the city centre, local train stations and neighbourhoods. The circular 11A and 11C routes also run nearby.
Further details on bus travel: https://intranet.birmingham.ac.uk/student/travelling-to-campus/travelling-by-bus.aspx
Car Parking
Northeast multi-storey car park (Pritchatts Road, B15 2SA).
You can park here for up to ten hours. Parking charges apply Monday to Sunday, between 8am and 6pm. This includes Bank holidays and university closed days.
Charges start from £3.40 and are capped at £10 (as of October 2024) Monday to Friday. If parking at the weekend or on a Bank holiday, there is a flat day rate of £2.50.
Taxi
TOA Taxis are a Birmingham-based company which is recommended by the university.
TOA Taxis: Birmingham black cab taxi service | Home | TOA Taxis
Accommodation
The university has its own onsite hotel accommodation, now known as the Edgbaston Park Hotel: https://www.edgbastonparkhotel.com/
The city centre has a greater range of accommodation options and is located around 10-15mins away by train.
Further information on city centre options can be found here: https://visitbirmingham.com/where-to-stay/
Medical assistance
First Aid: Dr Daniel Reynolds (symposiarch) is a qualified first aider.
Emergency service numbers: 999 or 112
Medical Practice:
The university has its own dedicated GP practitioner for non-emergency care: https://www.theump.co.uk/
UBHeard is a confidential listening and support service for all registered students (undergraduate and postgraduate) at the University of Birmingham. It offers immediate emotional and mental health support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
Call the service on 0800 368 5819 (Freephone UK*) or 00353 1 518 0277 (International), or visit the UBHeard portal (create an account with your UoB email address). You can also text ‘Hi’ to +44 74 1836 0780 for SMS & WhatsApp support (standard rates apply) or contact UBHeard via Live Chat.
Security
If there is an immediate risk to life, safety or security – yours, another person’s, or property – call the emergency services on 999. Then call Security on 0121 414 4444. If you are a member of the University of Birmingham, you can also alert them through the SafeZone app.
If you’re calling to report an alleged crime (especially assault/sexual assault, indecency, fraud, theft, or burglary), you should always contact both the police and Security. Security will be able to support you while you wait for the emergency services to arrive.
To report a non-emergency crime (e.g., theft), call Security on 0121 414 3000 or report an incident through the SafeZone app. You should also report the incident to the police online or by calling 101.
Food and drink
Lunch and refreshments will be provided for all symposium delegates. However, the campus also has a wide range of options you may prefer to explore: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/community/university-campus/retail/food-fellows/opening-times
The Main Library
The University Main Library is open 0800-2000 during university holidays and is open to visitors for consultation. Further information can be found here: https://intranet.birmingham.ac.uk/student/libraries/index.aspx
Symposium Feast (Sunday 13 April 1930)
The symposium feast will be held at Kolkata Lounge 1488 Pershore Rd, Bournville, Birmingham B30 2NT.
Byzantium from Below: 56th Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies – UPDATED PROGRAMME
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
56th Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies – Programme
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) “Title TBC”
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) “Title TBC”
1650-1715: Sophia Germanidou (Newcastle), “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)
1300-1315: 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”
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
Call for communications: 56th Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies at the University of Birmingham
Byzantium from below: rural and non-elite life in the Byzantine world
12th-14th April 2025
Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies
University of Birmingham
Call for communications
Abstracts are invited for communications at the 56th Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies to be held at the University of Birmingham, UK. Communications are 10-mins long. Communications related to the themes of non-elites, peasants and rural life in the Byzantine world are particularly encouraged. Abstracts should be 250 words in length and are due by Monday 6 January 2025.
Please send abstracts to d.k.reynolds@bham.ac.uk.
Successful applicants will be notified by mid-January 2025.
Symposium abstract
The Byzantine Empire was built on the backs of the rural and urban labour force. From agricultural production and the extraction of raw materials to the physical construction of urban centres and buildings, the strength of the empire’s economy and its imperial administration rested upon complex networks of labourers, artisans and ‘local notables’, across its natural landscapes, in villages, and cities. While huge advances have been made in studying labour processes in recent years, the experiences of such populations within the Byzantine world have received comparatively little attention when compared to other fields of late Roman and western medieval studies. How the Byzantine Empire was experienced and understood by those far removed from its centres of governance and central networks of power, are crucial questions for understanding the lived experience of the mostly silent majority whose lives played out both within, and around, the empire’s fluctuating ‘borders’. Beyond exploring the contribution of rural communities and non-elites to modes of production, this symposium will also explore what can be said of the intricacies of their lives, societies, and what it meant to ‘be Byzantine’, viewed from below.
New editor for Byzantine Modern Greek Studies
The Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies is pleased to announce that Dr Baukje van den Berg will assume the position of editor of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies at the start of 2025.
Dr van den Berg is Associate Professor in the Department of Historical Studies at the Central European University and director of its Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies. She is a leading expert in Byzantine literary thought and the reception of ancient literature in Byzantine culture. Her publications include her monograph Homer the Rhetorician: Eustathios of Thessalonike on the Composition of the Iliad (OUP, 2022) and a recent co-edited volume (with Nikos Zagklas) Poetry in Byzantine Literature and Society (1081–1204) (CUP, 2024).
The Centre would also like to express our most heartfelt thanks to Professor Ingela Nilsson (University of Uppsala), who steps down from the role. Professor Nilsson has been instrumental in ensuring the continued success of the journal in the past few years and its importance to Byzantine and Modern Greek scholarship within Birmingham, and across the globe.
Transitions: A Historian’s Memoir
Dear friends,We would like to invite you to celebrate with us the launch of Transitions: A Historian’s Memoir by Prof Dame Averil Cameron, President of the SPBS.
This event is organised by the Oxford Centre for Late Antiquity.
Discussants: Revd Canon Dr Peter Groves, Prof John Haldon FBA
Date: Tuesday 12th November 2024
Time: 5pm (UK time)
Venue: Levine Auditorium, Trinity College, Oxford
Online Attendance: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/
Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies and British School at Athens joint Autumn Lecture
Join us for the SPBS and BSA Autumn Lecture, featuring Professor Peter Sarris (Cambridge)!
Title: Writing the Reign of Justinian
Date: Tuesday, November 13th, 2024
Time: 5:00 PM (London)
In Person: Bush House Lecture Theatre 2 (4.04), King’s College London
Online: Zoom (Please register in advance below)
Professor Sarris, a leading authority on the study of Justinian’s reign, a pivotal period in Byzantine history. His latest book, JUSTINIAN: EMPEROR, SOLDIER, SAINT, has garnered critical acclaim and won prestigious awards, including the London Hellenic Prize.
This event is open to all! Whether you’re a Byzantine scholar or simply curious about this remarkable era, don’t miss this opportunity to gain insights from a leading expert.
Register now here!
Call for Papers: Radicalism and its Uses in Late Roman/Byzantine History (Session for the Leeds International Medieval Congress, 7–10 July 2025)
Radicalism, as a form of sociopolitical thought or action that aims at fully upturning the roots (radices) of a problem, must necessarily pose some threat to the status quo. The late Roman and/or Byzantine status quo is generally regarded to have been particularly impervious to such threats. One dominant narrative of Christianisation is that the ‘oppositional radicalism of the early church’, especially the radical potential of its social ethics, was defused in the rapprochement with mainstream Roman society and gave way to a non-radical ‘establishment outlook’ (Harper 2016, 141). This was, for some, unavoidable: ‘as Christianity was progressively identified with the Empire’, Christian ideas ‘gradually lost their radical character’ (Merianos & Gotsis 2017, 205). For others, it was a conscious counter-radical project, as ‘upper-class Christian leaders’ learned ‘to accommodate the Bible’s most radical social critiques… into something less threatening’ (Maxwell 2021, 158). Either way, the consequence is a model of Christian Roman society that affords little space for radicalism, even at the margins, over a thousand-year period.
This model is under challenge. The editors of the 2018 Cambridge Intellectual History of Byzantium criticise the field’s ‘persistent tendency… to subordinate individuals to normative ideas’ and to assume that late Romans ‘could not conceive a particular radical, heterodox, or supposedly modern idea because they could not think outside the box of their imperial-Orthodox framework’ (Kaldellis & Siniossoglou 2017, 18). “Radicalism” is one lens through which historians might meet this call for more generous study of the non-conformist elements of late Roman/Byzantine intellectual and political culture. Yet while our overarching scholarly narratives of late Roman history are just beginning to admit the possibility of “radicalism”, the terms “radical” and “radicals” have always appealed to any historian who wishes to emphasise moments of difference or divergence. We hear, for example, of the ‘radical Christian ascetics’ (Cullhed 2016, 352) who made a ‘radical rejection of normal life’ (Hezser 2018, 20), though their movements perhaps safely diverted the more threatening anti-wealth instincts of some Christians. We hear of ‘religious radicals’ (de Wet 2018, 74) and ‘guerilla… radical[s]’ (Drake 2002, 229) who made use of violence to advance their cause. We even hear of radical emperors pursuing ‘radical administrative reform’ (Bell, 2013, 165). And the late Roman past, whatever radical ideas it gave rise to itself, is productive ground for public-facing historians who think through inequality and capitalism, perhaps with a radical instinct of their own (e.g. Paolo Tedesco in Jacobin). For a society traditionally thought to have been un- or counter-radical to its core, its modern historians are eager to make claims for the radicalism of their chosen subjects.
In light of the above, the session organiser invites proposals for ambitious papers that critically interrogate the concept(s) and historiographical uses of “radicalism”, and seek to furnish the term with a sharper analytical utility. Papers may treat any aspect of late Roman or Byzantine history, conceived very broadly in time and space. They might explore any or more of the following:
- The definition(s) of radicalism in different late Roman/Byzantine contexts: what was “radical” in the late Roman or Byzantine world?
- Case studies of specific late Roman/Byzantine ideas and behaviour that are usefully described as, or were perceived at the time as, radical (or counter-radical);
- Late Roman/Byzantine attitudes to radicalism (philosophical, social, political, religious, etc.);
- Radical or counter-radical traditions of thought and/or action in the late Roman/Byzantine world;
- The conceptual utility of the terms “radical” and/or “counter-radical” for understanding aspects of the late Roman/Byzantine world;
- Previous scholarly uses of (or choices not to use) the term “radical” in a late Roman/Byzantine context that might be productively rethought;
- Radical approaches to the study of late Roman/Byzantine history.
Scholars of any career stage are welcome to propose a paper. To do so, please send a title and brief description of the paper, around 100 words in length, to matthew.hassall@liverpool.ac.uk by the end of Friday 20 September 2024. Questions are welcome at the same address. The organiser expects to be able to defray some of the costs of participating in the Congress for any speakers who do not have their own recourse to sufficient institutional funds.