Two Remarks on Michael Attaleiates’ Account of the Preliminaries to the Battle of Mantzikert†

The ability to extract fully the contextualized interpretations of Michael Attaleiates’ Historia is a rather difficult task without the parallel study of sources chronicling the same period. This article reconsiders Attaleiates’ justification for the division of the army by Diogenes before the battle of Mantzikert in 1071, and argues that the author is as critical of this emperor’s strategy as his close contemporary, Psellos, though his criticism is more subtly formulated. Another section discusses a gap in the narrative structure of the Historia and goes on to fill it with information derived from the Hyle Historias of Bryennios and from the chronicles of al-Bundari and Ibn al-‘Adim.     

Michael Psellos on friendship and love: erotic discourse in eleventh‐century Constantinople

This paper examines representations of friendship and desire in the writings of the Constantinopolitan author Michael Psellos (1018–c.1078). Within the Byzantine context of strict Christian constraints regarding expressions of sexual desire, Psellos reconfigures the dominant late antique image of friendship as unity, inspired by divine authority, with the subversive model of erôs as the pursuit of bodily pleasures. Therewith, Psellian discourse may be regarded as representative of novel trends in eleventh‐century Byzantium that anticipate the re‐appearance of romantic fiction. As is argued here, such novel trends are to be understood within the context of Byzantium's continuous dialogue with its past, rather than as part of linear historiographical narratives.     

An abbot between two cultures: Maiolus of Cluny considers the Muslims of La Garde‐Freinet

In July 972, Muslim raiders from the citadel of Fraxinetum (modern La Garde‐Freinet) abducted Abbot Maiolus of Cluny and his entourage as they crossed the Great Saint Bernard Pass (Mons Iovis) in the western Alps. This article analyses a little‐known letter that Maiolus sent to his Cluniac brethren to secure payment for his release. Interwoven with biblical passages drawn from the Book of Samuel and the Psalter, the abbot's ransom letter provides the rare opportunity to examine how one of the most influential Christian leaders of the tenth century perceived his Muslim captors and their religion.     

Much Ado About Dugald: The Chequered Career of Dugald Stewart's Letter to Sir William Forbes on James Beattie's Essay on Truth

Summary

Although Sir William Forbes of Pitsligo's An Account of the Life and Writings of James Beattie has long served as an invaluable resource for those interested in Beattie's life and thought, there has been little scholarship on the genesis of Forbes's book. This article considers the role played by Dugald Stewart—as well as that of his friend, Archibald Alison—in the making of Forbes's Life of Beattie. It also examines the reasons for Forbes's decision not to print Stewart's letter in its entirety in the Life of Beattie and explores the letter's significance for understanding Stewart's philosophical development.     

Landesque capital as an alternative to food storage in Melanesia: Irrigated taro terraces in New Georgia,Solomon Islands

Abstract

In the Pacific islands, subsistence diversity made possible continuous production of food while well-developed exchange networks redistributed these foodstuffs as well as items within the prestige economy. All these were aspects of the ‘storage structures’ that enabled social and nutritional value to be saved, accumulated and later mobilised. In addition, there were investments in the land, landesque capital, which secured future food surpluses and so provided an alternative to food storage, in a region where the staple foods were mostly perishable, yams excepted, and food preservation was difficult. Landesque capital included such long-term improvements to productivity as terraces, mounds, irrigation channels, drainage ditches, soil structural changes and tree planting. These investments provided an effective alternative to food storage and made possible surplus production for exchange purposes. As an example, in the New Georgia group of the western Solomon Islands irrigated terraces, termed ruta, were constructed for growing the root crop taro (Colocasia esculenta). Surplus taro from ruta enabled inland groups to participate in regional exchange networks and so obtain the shell valuables that were produced by coastal groups. In this paper, we reconstruct how this exchange system worked in New Georgia using ethno-archaeological evidence, we chart its prehistoric rise and post-colonial fall, and we outline the factors that constrained its long-term expansion.     

Miloš Obrenović and the deposition of a Constantinopolitan Patriarch

Abstract

In my limited study of the Greek and Serbian Churches in the nineteenth century, I had found numerous cases of Greek meddling in Serbian affairs, but never a reverse case. Then I came across a passing reference in Gavrilovic´s fine biography of Prince Milo? Obrenovi? of Serbia (who ruled from 1815 to 1839) to Milo?’ playing a major part in ousting a Patriarch of Constantinople. Following up Gavrilovi?'s citation led me to the following letter written by Prince Milo? during his triumphal visit to Constantinople in 1835. It was written (and it should be noted this means dictated since Milo? was illiterate) to his wife Ljubica on 28 September 1835. Since I have never come across any reference to the events Milos describes in any work I have made use of on the patriarchate in the 19th century, I have taken the liberty of translating the letter from Milo?’ Serbian both to call attention to it and to make the text available to a wider range of scholars. The original text is to be found in Mita Petrovi?, Financije i Ustanove obnovljene Srbije do 1842, Beograd, 1901, pp.336–37.     

DEBATING TOTALITARIANISM: AN EXCHANGE OF LETTERS BETWEEN HANNAH ARENDT AND ERIC VOEGELIN

In 1952, Waldemar Gurian, founding editor of The Review of Politics, commissioned Eric Voegelin, then a professor of political science at Louisiana State University, to review Hannah Arendt's recently published The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). She was given the right to reply; Voegelin would furnish a concluding note. Preceding this dialogue, Voegelin wrote a letter to Arendt anticipating aspects of his review; she responded in kind. Arendt's letter to Voegelin on totalitarianism, written in German, has never appeared in print before. She wrote two drafts of it, the first and longest being the more interesting. It contained an early reference to her thinking about the relationship among plurality, politics, and philosophy. It also invoked her notion of the compelling “logic” of totalitarian ideology. But this was not the letter Voegelin received. Because of this, he misunderstood significant parts of her argument. Below, the two versions of Arendt's letter are translated. They are prefaced by a translation of Voegelin's initial message to Arendt. An introduction compares Arendt's letters, offers context, and provides a snapshot of Arendt's and Voegelin's perceptions of each other. Their views of political religion and human nature are also highlighted. Keyed to Arendt and Voegelin's letters are pertinent aspects of the debate in The Review of Politics that followed their epistolary exchange.     

On fifteenth-century Cryptochristianity: A Letter to George Amoiroutzes from Michael Apostolis

Abstract

In this note I wish to draw attention to some hitherto unexploited evidence concerning fifteenth-eentury Cryptochristianity in a letter addressed to George Amoiroutzes by his friend and relative Michael Apostolis, the platonist and unionist intellectual and copyist.     

José Zorrilla in Mexico: Transatlantic Romanticism and the Question of Artistic Labour

This article explores the strategic use of literary form in the Mexican writings of José Zorrilla. The article focuses on México y los mexicanos (1856), a letter Zorrilla wrote to his fellow Spanish Romantic playwright, Ángel de Saavedra, the Duke of Rivas. Zorrilla’s México y los mexicanos is a rare piece of epistolary writing in Spanish Romanticism as well as one of the first literary histories of Mexico. Often overlooked in the letter, however, is Zorrilla’s economic critique of the precarious condition of artists in both Mexico and Spain. A conservative moderado, Zorrilla could not air his concerns publicly without the threat of retribution from his fellow conservative colleagues in Spain. Zorrilla thus used the epistolary form, the article argues, in order to surreptitiously introduce the economic plight of artists into mainstream Spanish as well as Mexican political discourse. Read in this context, Zorrilla’s letter makes visible the fundamental role a transatlantic Romantic vision of labour played in shaping nineteenth-century political discourse in both the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America.     

The French romantics

Berkeley's Theory of Vision, or Visual Language Showing The Immediate Presence and Providence of A Deity, Vindicated And Explained was published in 1733, occasioned by an anonymous letter of the previous year to the London Daily Post Boy. The letter criticized Berkeley's New Theory of Vision, which had been published in 1709, but which had been appended to Berekely's Alciphron, published in 1732. No one has ever identified the author whose criticisms led Berkeley to his Theory of Vision Vindicated. Circumstantial evidence presented here suggests that the author was Catherine Trotter Cockburn. Part of the evidence is the brilliance of her interpretation of Locke, whose position is defended in the letter against Berkeley.     

Paul’s Euripides,Greek tragedy and Hebrew antiquity in Paradise Regain’d

ABSTRACT

The exchange between Satan and Jesus in Book IV of Paradise Regained is the first substantial account of tragedy in John Milton’s 1671 volume. In his response to Satan’s Athenian temptation, Jesus offers an alternative to the more familiar defence of tragedy in the preface to Samson Agonistes. Here, Jesus invokes the Hebrew prehistory of Attic tragedy, expanding Milton’s tragic archive beyond the antique Athenians themselves, drawing instead upon Clement of Alexandria and Socrates of Constantinople – both of whom support Milton’s idiosyncratic belief that Paul quoted Euripides at I Corinthians 15:33. And where Clement and Socrates support this tragic provenance, they also address the vexed relationship between Christian faith and heathen learning. Far from showing contempt for Athenian art or erudition, Milton invokes these Patristic sources to enable readers to locate Jesus’ critical response in a dynamic relationship to the relevant preface to Samson Agonistes.     

Fugitives and ethnography in Priscus of Panium

Abstract

Because the historical writings of Priscus of Panium survive only in fragments, we regrettably lack knowledge of the full complexity of this fifth century historian's concerns. Widely cited in Byzantine sources, the greatest part of Priscus’ work is found in the Excerpta de Legationibus, which was compiled from ancient texts by the emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitos in the middle of the tenth century as part of an encyclopedic collation of educational and practical information. The Excerpta, which dealt with international relations, found much of interest in Priscus, whose history included a detailed account of the struggle between the Romans and Attila the Hun. Of particular value is Priscus' first-hand account of an embassy to Attila in 449 to discuss the exchange of fugitives and other matters. On this journey Priscus served as an assistant to Maximinus, the leader of the diplomatic mission sent from Constantinople. Envoys to foreign lands regularly included in their reports detailed observations of the societies they visited, and in this tradition the fragments preserved in the Excerpta constitute an invaluable source of information about Hunnic life as well as diplomatic matters. Priscus later reworked his acute observations of the Huns made on the embassy and mixed them with other information in the larger framework of his historical treatise, adapting part of his diplomatic intelligence report to the needs of a different sort of literary enterprise. We cannot know with any certainty the thematic architectonics of this historical work, but its fragments make it clear that Priscus' treatment of the relations between Rome and the Empire of the Huns and his development of cultural issues implicit in those relations were more subtle than the tenth century editors' focus on diplomatics might suggest.     

Practical Hagiography: James of Voragine’s Sermones and Vita on St Margaret of Antioch

Abstract

In addition to his exceedingly popular Legenda Aurea, James of Voragine wrote in another hagiographical genre: sermons on the saints. The Sermones de sanctis likewise became immediately popular, as his Dominican brothers used James’s model sermons to learn to preach about the saints in a format that would provide the laity with intelligible and practical theological instruction. James’s corpus gives us a rather unusual opportunity to compare the ways in which a single author manipulates multiple hagiographical genres, and his writings on St Margaret of Antioch allow us to explore how a medieval preacher used a historically disputed saint — a dragon-fighter — to provide a practical model of sanctity to his lay audience. I compare the representations of Margaret in James’s sermones and vita, arguing that James adapted certain features of Margaret’s saintly example in the vita to instruct the audience of his sermons about proper Christian virtues and actions. As a point of comparison, I explore a sermon by Évrard of Val des Écoliers in which the Augustinian teaches his audience a practical skill — how to pray — through Margaret’s example.     

‘Feeling the rhythm of the waves: “castaway rhetoric” in John Eugenikos’ Logos eucharisterios’

Abstract

In September 1438 John Eugenikos decided to quit the council of Ferrara and sail back to Constantinople. Off Italy's Adriatic coast his vessel experienced a terrible shipwreck, whereby many of John's fellow-passengers perished. John decided then to retell his almost deadly experience in a thanks-giving logos, allegedly compiled on the basis of notes written down soon after the shipwreck. The logos stands out as a unique document in the landscape of Byzantine travel literature. This paper offers the first comprehensive literary analysis of Eugenikos’ account, shedding new light on the narrative patterns chosen by the author to recount his own experience and stage his public persona.