Giulia Rossetto – författare

Throughout a millennium of history, the Byzantine Empire remained at the intersection of Eastern and Western civilizations. The location of its great capital city, Constantinople, on the frontier between Europe and Asia, ensured its enduring importance in cross-cultural exchange. People of different ethnicities, social strata, and faiths from the Eastern Mediterranean and beyond left their marks as travellers or settlers.From late antiquity, when the entire Eastern Mediterranean  was encompassed by the empire, until the fifteenth century, when Byzantium had been reduced to a city-state with its hinterland, Byzantine culture had a far-reaching impact on the region. This volume considers Byzantium as a cosmopolitan space. Guided by the major research interests of Claudia Rapp, to whom it is dedicated, it is divided into three thematic blocks: “Sanctity and Society”, “Mobility and Identities”, and “Manuscripts and Material Culture”. The contributions reveal Byzantium as a realm of intercultural contact and exchange, where majority and minority cultures were in a complex dialogue and productive tension with each other, and where pilgrims, traders, soldiers, and scholars traversed political, religious, social, and intellectual borders.

Mobility and migration were not uncommon in Byzantium, as is true for all societies. Yet, scholarship is only beginning to pay attention to these phenomena. This book presents in English translation a wide array of relevant source texts from ca. 650 to ca. 1450 originally written in medieval Greek: from administrative records, saints’ lives and letters by churchmen to ego-documents by ambassadors and historical narratives by court historians. Each source text is accompanied by a detailed introduction, commentary and further bibliography, thus making the book accessible to both scholars and students and laying the groundwork for future research on the internal dynamics of Byzantine society.

This book is dedicated to monks, priests and priest-monks (hieromonachoi) as copyists, readers, and owners of manuscripts in the Christian East. Did they only read and write, or did they also repair manuscripts? What texts did they copy? And what purpose did their books serve? By addressing these and related questions, alternating between overviews and case studies, the essays in this volume aim to shed new light on the cultural role of monks and clergy active in the Christian East—particularly in the Sinai and the Holy Land, with an additional focus on Antioch—between the 9th and the 16th centuries. Special attention is given to books written in Greek, Arabic, Syriac, and Georgian.

This volume brings together the plenary papers presented at the 25th International Congress of Byzantine Studies, reflecting new developments and trends in current research on the Byzantine world and its enduring legacy. Organized into six sections, the studies address multiple aspects of Byzantine history, culture, literature, archaeology, and art. In tune with the overarching theme of the congress, several chapters examine the ways in which Byzantium interacted with and was perceived by others, as well as how Byzantine ideas, culture, and identity were interpreted, adapted, and reimagined in later periods. Together, they illuminate Byzantium’s lasting place in the medieval world and its influence both within and beyond its borders.