The Rhetorical Exercises of Nikephoros Basilakes

The Rhetorical Exercises of Nikephoros Basilakes PDF Author: Nikēphoros (ho Vasilakēs)
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674660242
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
Progymnasmata, exercises in the study of declamation, were the cornerstone of elite education from Hellenistic through Byzantine times. The Rhetorical Exercises of Nikephoros Basilakes, translated here into English for the first time, illuminate teaching and literary culture in one of the most important epochs of the Byzantine Empire.

The Rhetorical Exercises of Nikephoros Basilakes

The Rhetorical Exercises of Nikephoros Basilakes PDF Author: Nikēphoros (ho Vasilakēs)
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674660242
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
Progymnasmata, exercises in the study of declamation, were the cornerstone of elite education from Hellenistic through Byzantine times. The Rhetorical Exercises of Nikephoros Basilakes, translated here into English for the first time, illuminate teaching and literary culture in one of the most important epochs of the Byzantine Empire.

Byzantine Intersectionality

Byzantine Intersectionality PDF Author: Roland Betancourt
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691210888
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
A fascinating history of marginalized identities in the medieval world While the term “intersectionality” was coined in 1989, the existence of marginalized identities extends back over millennia. Byzantine Intersectionality reveals the fascinating, little-examined conversations in medieval thought and visual culture around sexual and reproductive consent, bullying and slut-shaming, homosocial and homoerotic relationships, trans and nonbinary gender identities, and the depiction of racialized minorities. Roland Betancourt explores these issues in the context of the Byzantine Empire, using sources from late antiquity and early Christianity up to the early modern period. Highlighting nuanced and strikingly modern approaches by medieval writers, philosophers, theologians, and doctors, Betancourt offers a new history of gender, sexuality, and race. Betancourt weaves together art, literature, and an impressive array of texts to investigate depictions of sexual consent in images of the Virgin Mary, tactics of sexual shaming in the story of Empress Theodora, narratives of transgender monks, portrayals of same-gender desire in images of the Doubting Thomas, and stereotypes of gender and ethnicity in representations of the Ethiopian Eunuch. He also gathers evidence from medical manuals detailing everything from surgical practices for late terminations of pregnancy to save a mother’s life to a host of procedures used to affirm a person’s gender. Showing how understandings of gender, sexuality, and race have long been enmeshed, Byzantine Intersectionality offers a groundbreaking look at the culture of the medieval world.

Managing Emotion in Byzantium

Managing Emotion in Byzantium PDF Author: Margaret Mullett
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1351358499
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 528

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Book Description
Byzantinists entered the study of emotion with Henry Maguire’s ground-breaking article on sorrow, published in 1977. Since then, classicists and western medievalists have developed new ways of understanding how emotional communities work and where the ancients’ concepts of emotion differ from our own, and Byzantinists have begun to consider emotions other than sorrow. It is time to look at what is distinctive about Byzantine emotion. This volume is the first to look at the constellation of Byzantine emotions. Originating at an international colloquium at Dumbarton Oaks, these papers address issues such as power, gender, rhetoric, or asceticism in Byzantine society through the lens of a single emotion or cluster of emotions. Contributors focus not only on the construction of emotions with respect to perception and cognition but also explore how emotions were communicated and exchanged across broad (multi)linguistic, political and social boundaries. Priorities are twofold: to arrive at an understanding of what the Byzantines thought of as emotions and to comprehend how theory shaped their appraisal of reality. Managing Emotion in Byzantium will appeal to researchers and students alike interested in Byzantine perceptions of emotion, Byzantine Culture, and medieval perceptions of emotion.

Sight, Touch, and Imagination in Byzantium

Sight, Touch, and Imagination in Byzantium PDF Author: Roland Betancourt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108657273
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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Book Description
Considering the interrelations between sight, touch, and imagination, this book surveys classical, late antique, and medieval theories of vision to elaborate on how various spheres of the Byzantine world categorized and comprehended sensation and perception. Revisiting scholarly assumptions about the tactility of sight in the Byzantine world, it demonstrates how the haptic language associated with vision referred to the cognitive actions of the viewer as they grasped sensory data in the mind in order to comprehend and produce working imaginations of objects for thought and memory. At stake is how the affordances and limitations of the senses came to delineate and cultivate the manner in which art and rhetoric was understood as mediating the realities they wished to convey. This would similarly come to contour how Byzantine religious culture could also go about accessing the sacred, the image serving as a site of desire for the mediated representation of the Divine.

Round Trip to Hades in the Eastern Mediterranean Tradition

Round Trip to Hades in the Eastern Mediterranean Tradition PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004375961
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
Round Trip to Hades in the Eastern Mediterranean Tradition explores the theme of visits to the underworld in the ancient Greek and Byzantine traditions from a broad perspective including written sources, iconography and archaeology.

The Virgin Mary in Byzantium, c.400–1000

The Virgin Mary in Byzantium, c.400–1000 PDF Author: Mary B. Cunningham
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009327232
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
The Virgin Mary assumed a position of central importance in Byzantium. This major and authoritative study examines her portrayal in liturgical texts during the first six centuries of Byzantine history. Focusing on three main literary genres that celebrated this holy figure, it highlights the ways in which writers adapted their messages for different audiences. Mary is portrayed variously as defender of the imperial city, Constantinople, virginal Mother of God, and ascetic disciple of Christ. Preachers, hymnographers, and hagiographers used rhetoric to enhance Mary's powerful status in Eastern Christian society, depicting her as virgin and mother, warrior and ascetic, human and semi-divine being. Their paradoxical statements were based on the fundamental mystery that Mary embodied: she was the mother of Christ, the Word of God, who provided him with the human nature that he assumed in his incarnation. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

The Orator Demades

The Orator Demades PDF Author: Sviatoslav Dmitriev
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197517846
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
This is the first monograph in English about Demades, an influential Athenian politician from the fourth century B.C. An orator whose fame outlived him for hundreds of years, he was an acquaintance and collaborator of many political and military leaders of classical Greece, including the Macedonian king Philip II, his son and successor Alexander III (the Great), and the orator Demosthenes. An overwhelming portion of the available evidence on Demades dates to at least three centuries after his death and, often, much later. Contextualizing the sources within their historical and cultural framework, The Orator Demades delineates how later rhetorical practices and social norms transformed his image to better reflect the educational needs and political realities of the Roman imperial and Byzantine periods. The evolving image of Demades illustrates the role that rhetoric, as the basis of education and edification under the Roman and Byzantine Empires, played in creating an alternate, inauthentic vision of the classical past that continues to dominate modern scholarship and popular culture. As a result, the book raises a general question about the problematic foundations of our knowledge of classical Greece.

Sources for Byzantine Art History: Volume 3, The Visual Culture of Later Byzantium (1081–c.1350)

Sources for Byzantine Art History: Volume 3, The Visual Culture of Later Byzantium (1081–c.1350) PDF Author: Foteini Spingou
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108643906
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1683

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Book Description
In this book the beauty and meaning of Byzantine art and its aesthetics are for the first time made accessible through the original sources. More than 150 medieval texts are translated from nine medieval languages into English, with commentaries from over seventy leading scholars. These include theories of art, discussions of patronage and understandings of iconography, practical recipes for artistic supplies, expressions of devotion, and descriptions of cities. The volume reveals the cultural plurality and the interconnectivity of medieval Europe and the Mediterranean from the late eleventh to the early fourteenth centuries. The first part uncovers salient aspects of Byzantine artistic production and its aesthetic reception, while the second puts a spotlight on particular ways of expressing admiration and of interpreting of the visual.

Witness Literature in Byzantium

Witness Literature in Byzantium PDF Author: Adam J. Goldwyn
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030788571
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
This book analyzes Byzantine examples of witness literature, a genre that focuses on eyewitness accounts written by slaves, prisoners, refugees, and other victims of historical atrocity. It focuses on such episodes in three nonfictional texts – John Kaminiates’ Capture of Thessaloniki (904), Eustathios of Thessaloniki’s Capture of Thessaloniki (1186), and Niketas Choniates’ History (ca. 1204–17) – and the three extant twelfth-century Komnenian novels to consider how the authors’ positions as both eyewitness and victim require an interpretive method that distinguishes witness literature from other kinds of writing about the past. Drawing on theoretical developments in the fields of Holocaust and Genocide Studies (such as Giorgio Agamben’s homo sacer and Michel Foucault’s biopolitics) and comparisons with modern examples (Elie Wiesel’s Night and Primo Levi’s If This is a Man), Witness Literature emphasizes the affective, subjective, and experiential in medieval Greek historical writing.

Transmitting and Circulating the Late Antique and Byzantine Worlds

Transmitting and Circulating the Late Antique and Byzantine Worlds PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004409467
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
Transmitting and Circulating the Late Antique and Byzantine Worlds seeks to be a crucial contribution to the history of medieval connectedness.