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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

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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.
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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.

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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
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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!

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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.
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Roman Constantinople in Byzantine Perspective

The Memorial and Aesthetic Rediscovery of Constantine’s Beautiful City, from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance

Author:

Paul Magdalino
This book studies the research perspective in which the literary inhabitants of Late Antique and medieval Constantinople remembered its past and conceptualised its existence as a Greek city that was the political capital of a Christian Roman state. Initial reactions to Constantine’s foundation noted its novel Christian orientation, but the memorial mode of writing about the city that developed from the sixth century recollected the traditional civic cultural heritage that Constantinople claimed both as the New Rome, and as the continuation of ancient Byzantion. This research culture increasingly became the preserve of the imperial bureaucracy, and focused on the city’s sculptured monuments as bearers of eschatological meaning. Yet from the tenth century, writers progressively preferred to define the wonder and spectacle of Constantinople in the aesthetic mode of urban praise inherited from late antiquity, developing the notion of the city as a cosmic theatre of excellence.
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Crow Week! Celebrating Professor Jim Crow

Edinburgh’s Centre for Late Antique, Islamic & Byzantine Studies (CLAIBS) is delighted to announce Crow Week!

On Monday 13 May 2024, CLAIBS is honoured to host, in hybrid format, this year’s joint lecture of the Austrian (OEBG) and British (SPBS) societies for Byzantine Studies, delivered by CLAIBS’s own Jim Crow with Galina Fingarova (University of Vienna) as respondent.  The lecture is entitled ‘Peeping under the Palimpsest: reclaiming the urban topography of Byzantine Constantinople’.

Abstract: A recent publication on late antique and medieval urbanism titled ‘Cities as palimpsests?’ draws attention to the multi-layered nature of ancient cities and the nuanced perspectives which are offered for the study of evolving urbanism. But how far is this engaging metaphor relevant for understanding the city beneath our feet and as a contribution to comprehending past lifeways? By reviewing past and contemporary approaches and methodologies I aim to consider the contribution of previous observations and excavations for the topography and infrastructure of the city, with particular attention to the Byzantine remains enclosed within the circuit wall of the Topkapı Saray, the city’s first hill.

Proceedings commence at 5.30pm BST.  All welcome; registration – for in person or remote participation – is open at https://edin.ac/3QiNueS

On Friday that same week (17 May 2024), CLAIBS, in collaboration with Edinburgh’s Departments of Archaeology and Classics, looks forward to hosting a half-day hybrid workshop – ‘Of Walls and Aqueducts: Celebrating Professor Jim Crow’ – to mark Professor Crow’s recent retirement from his distinguished tenure as Edinburgh’s Chair in Classical and Byzantine Archaeology. Three speakers representing the three areas of the Centre – Ine Jacobs (Oxford) for Late Antique studies, Scott Redford (SOAS) for Islamic studies, and Edinburgh’s Margaret Mullett for Byzantine studies – will deliver talks relevant to Professor Crow’s own work and in his honour.  The academic part will last from 3.15–6pm BST.  All welcome; for further details and registration – for in person or remote participation – see https://edin.ac/3QgRLjg

With any queries, please contact Niels Gaul (N.Gaul@ed.ac.uk).

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SPBS-OEBG Joint Lecture 2024 – Hybrid Event!

Peeping under the palimpsest: reclaiming the urban topography of Byzantine Constantinople

Prof. Jim Crow (University of Edinburgh)
Respondent: Dr Galina Fingarova (Universität Wien)

Event Details:
In person
May 13th 2024 at 5:30PM
Location: Meadows Lecture Theatre, Edinburgh, EH8 9AG

The subject of this talk is the sub-surface archaeology of Constantinople. A recent publication on late antique and medieval urbanism titled ‘Cities as Palimpsests?’ draws attention to the multi-layered nature of ancient cities and the nuanced perspectives which are offered for the study of evolving urbanism. But how far is this engaging metaphor relevant for understanding the city beneath our feet and as a contribution to comprehending past lifeways? By reviewing past and contemporary approaches and methodologies I aim to consider the contribution of previous observations and excavations for the topography and infrastructure of the city, with particular attention to the Byzantine remains enclosed within the circuit wall of the Topkapi Saray, the city’s first hill.

To register please click here