Two Byzantine craftsmen in fifteenth-century London

It is generally thought, largely on the basis of a letter of Cardinal Bessarion, that, by the 1440s, the Byzantine Empire had been completely overtaken by the West in all spheres of technical expertise. This idea is challenged the evidence of some documents the Public Record Office in London which show that, between at least 1441 and 1483, two gold wire drawers from Constantinople, named Andronicus and Alexius Effomatos, lived and worked in the English capital. It is argued that these craftsmen were welcomed because they specialised in making gold thread of a type which had long been manufactured in Byzantium but was superior in strength and economy to that produced in England. Indeed, since the earliest evidence for native English production of this type of gold thread dates from the period of their residence in London, there is at least the possibility that they actually introduced their craft into England, reversing the relative balance of technology as it is usually portrayed.     

Two Byzantine Albanian icons: a non-destructive archaeometric study

The present work is part of a project aimed at studying the pigments and painting techniques used by Albanian iconographers to produce Byzantine and post-Byzantine icons dating from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries; the state of conservation of these icons was also explored. Inorganic pigments are identified by means of X-ray fluorescence, reflectance spectrophotometry and UV fluorescence analysis. These analysis techniques were performed to discriminate between pigments on the basis of their typical features. Moreover, the study of the optical properties of paintings is of fundamental importance for correct restoration. This work enabled us to recognise the palette used in two artworks by anonymous painters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Only three small samples were taken from the edge and the back of the wooden tables in order to achieve information on preparatory layers. Twelve to fourteen non-destructive measurements were made to characterise the palette used by the two anonymous painters.     

Death ritual in fifteenth-century manuscript illumination

Realistic images of death and burial appear in unprecedented numbers as illustrations for the Office of the Dead in late medieval prayerbooks. Taking issue with the traditional, generalized interpretations of these images as expressions of the late medieval preoccupation with death, the author argues that the iconography of death ritual that emerged after 1375 was actually a manifestation of the popular need to assert the restoration of social and religious traditions that had been suspended during the period when the Black Death ravaged western Europe. Viewed against the background of pre-plague catholic death rituals and the literary evidence of the disruption and suspension of those rituals resulting from the onslaught of bubonic plague, the new iconography of death and burial assumes social significance that sets it apart from more eschatologically oriented visual and literary themes associated with death and dying during the late middle ages.     

Death ritual in fifteenth-century manuscript illumination

Realistic images of death and burial appear in unprecedented numbers as illustrations for the Office of the Dead in late medieval prayerbooks. Taking issue with the traditional, generalized interpretations of these images as expressions of the late medieval preoccupation with death, the author argues that the iconography of death ritual that emerged after 1375 was actually a manifestation of the popular need to assert the restoration of social and religious traditions that had been suspended during the period when the Black Death ravaged western Europe. Viewed against the background of pre-plague catholic death rituals and the literary evidence of the disruption and suspension of those rituals resulting from the onslaught of bubonic plague, the new iconography of death and burial assumes social significance that sets it apart from more eschatologically oriented visual and literary themes associated with death and dying during the late middle ages.     

Fornicating with nuns in fifteenth-century Bologna

The article opens with the prosecution in 1432 of a spicer for abducting a nun. This is first of all presented as the story of a trial: the formation of the indictment, the defence tactics, the deposition of witnesses, and only then are the experience of the nun, and the gender relations in the event, examined. This leads to numerous contexts: legal (the development of the law on sexual relations with professed nuns); judicial (similar cases in late fourteenth-/fifteenth-century Bologna); monastic (the unstable history of convents); social (the place of the nunnery in the local sexual economy); and historiographic (Ruggiero's ‘culture of illicit sexuality’).     

Fornicating with nuns in fifteenth-century Bologna

The article opens with the prosecution in 1432 of a spicer for abducting a nun. This is first of all presented as the story of a trial: the formation of the indictment, the defence tactics, the deposition of witnesses, and only then are the experience of the nun, and the gender relations in the event, examined. This leads to numerous contexts: legal (the development of the law on sexual relations with professed nuns); judicial (similar cases in late fourteenth-/fifteenth-century Bologna); monastic (the unstable history of convents); social (the place of the nunnery in the local sexual economy); and historiographic (Ruggiero's ‘culture of illicit sexuality’).     

Credit and parochial charity in fifteenth-century Bruges

In late medieval Bruges, the poor tables, lay-run parochial charitable institutions that fed the resident paupers of the parish, obtained regular income by investing gifts and surplus funds in annuity rents, low-interest loans secured by property. The market in annuity rents provided an important source of inexpensive long-term credit that the merchant bankers, deposit bankers, and pawnbrokers of Bruges did not or could not supply, allowing the property owners of Bruges to draw upon the value of their immovable property without alienating it. Charitable gifts thus not only fed the poor but also kept capital circulating within the urban economy.     

Literacy in the Byzantine World

Abstract

The historian Nicephorus Gregoras, writing of the Patriarch Athanasios I, dismisses him scathingly as <inline-graphic href="splitsection4_in1.tif"/><inline-graphic href="splitsection4_in2.tif"/>. Yet we know that Athanasius, who came from the countryside near Adrianople, was reading the Lives of Saints before the age of twelve. And his surviving writings—homilies, encyclicals, canonical decisions, letters, etc.—fill the 204 folios of codex Vaticanus graecus 2219. Most of these writings still await publication. But the recent edition by Mrs. Alice-Mary Talbot of 115 of Athanasios' letters shows that he wrote fluent literary Kaine Greek, without the archaizing affectations of Byzantine Atticism and with occasional voluntary or involuntary lapses into the spoken language of his time. He was no stylist: for him it was the matter, not the manner, that counted. He had little acquaintance with classical Greek literature. But in addition to the Scriptures, which he constantly quotes, he was familiar with the more widely read works of the fourth-century fathers, knew the basic texts of civil and canon law, and could quote the Epanagoge. Clearly he was no illiterate, but a professional user of the written word.     

Redeeming Byzantine Epistolography

Abstract

The Russian scholar V.A. Smetanin, whose work during the 1970s and 1980s dealt exclusively with Byzantine epistolography, would clearly like to think of himself as an ‘epistolologist', occupied in the specialised field of Byzantine ‘epistolology'. Epistolology is an auxiliary discipline within history, according to Smetanin, which encompasses both theoretical and practical concerns. Its theoretical interests are to work out methods for, (a¹) drawing boundaries between letters and other historical documents, (b¹) dating letters on the basis of their epistolological markings (epistolologicheskich priznakov), and (c¹) understanding the introduction and assimilation of correspondence into learned discourse. On its practical side, epistolology aims to solve problems of, (a²) the immediate components (nepocredstvennoe vychlenenie) of correspondence, (b²) its architectonics, and finally (c²), the introduction and assimilation of the epistolographic legacy into learned discourse. Smetanin opens a middle road within epistolology, too, in effect a series of ‘steps’ (stupenich) which converge on both theory and practice. Thus the so-called ?oχωρισι (a³) takes in the question of the distinguishing features of epistolography, ?ρo? λευσι(b³) works out its manner or conduct and ??ρμoσι (c³) studies its function or use.     

拜占庭的“展示”研究

本文是2006年伦敦第21届世界拜占庭大会开幕式上的主题发言。从公开、自觉的夸示,世俗生活模式的展示和教俗势力所禁止的习俗表现等3个方面阐释了拜占庭帝国在历史上和现实中“展示”（display）自己的方式,并指出,21世纪拜占庭研究者的任务就是探寻拜占庭文明对其周边世界的影响,将其“展示”于天下。     

High justice in fifteenth-century Normandy: the prosecution of Sandrin Bourel

By the fifteenth century the seigneurial exercise of high justice had become less common because of the growth of royal jurisdiction. The ancient and wealthy Benedictine nunnery of Montivilliers retained the right to high justice only during the octave of the Holy Cross. In 1493 Sandrin Bourel, a young man who had twice before been imprisoned for theft, was apprehended in the act of stealing from a bourgeois of Montivilliers. As the crime occurred during the octave of the Holy Cross the abbey claimed jurisdiction. A special tribunal was created to prosecute him. After having been tortured, Bourel was found guilty and hanged. The documents generated by this event provide the basis for a case study of the application of criminal procedure at the close of the middle ages. The condemned man's confession, rich in biographical detail, gives us a profile of a petty thief and vagabond on the margin of society. The financial account of the abbey's receiver-general documents in detail the total cost of the prosecution of a single medieval criminal.     

High justice in fifteenth-century Normandy: the prosecution of Sandrin Bourel

By the fifteenth century the seigneurial exercise of high justice had become less common because of the growth of royal jurisdiction. The ancient and wealthy Benedictine nunnery of Montivilliers retained the right to high justice only during the octave of the Holy Cross. In 1493 Sandrin Bourel, a young man who had twice before been imprisoned for theft, was apprehended in the act of stealing from a bourgeois of Montivilliers. As the crime occurred during the octave of the Holy Cross the abbey claimed jurisdiction. A special tribunal was created to prosecute him. After having been tortured, Bourel was found guilty and hanged. The documents generated by this event provide the basis for a case study of the application of criminal procedure at the close of the middle ages. The condemned man's confession, rich in biographical detail, gives us a profile of a petty thief and vagabond on the margin of society. The financial account of the abbey's receiver-general documents in detail the total cost of the prosecution of a single medieval criminal.     

Byzantine Planning: Site Management in Istanbul

Abstract

A new site management plan for Istanbul’s Historic Peninsula was approved in late 2011. In this paper, we examine its institutional setting, preparation process, and contents from organizational and administrative perspectives. The result of a participatory process, the plan is professional, logically consistent, and effectively identifies challenges facing cultural heritage. The heart of the plan is a complex architecture of Objectives, Strategies, and Actions that are integrated into forty-nine Project Packages. Surprisingly, however, the plan specifies neither concrete activities nor financial resource­s. Moreover, cultural heritage is consistently downplayed: rather than substantive interventions at monuments or museums, attention is focused on managerial and urban planning buzzwords (coordination, capacity-building, participation, awareness-raising, marketing). This arose from the preparation process, which was participatory but nonetheless dominated by urban planners and government agencies. The case suggests the potential risks of the uncritical application of managerial and urban planning tools to cultural heritage.     

The Treatment of Byzantine Place-Names

Abstract

The anonymus author of An Historical Curiosity, One Hundred and Forty-One Ways of spelling Birmingham (London 1880) unaccountably complicated things by listing his spellings in neither alphabetical nor chronological order. But he may also have been revolutionary in treating all spellings with equal respect, as names in their own right, rather than variants of ‘Birmingham’, the authorised version which happens to be a poor reflection of what people actually call the place. His treatment was in mind when I indexed the toponyms in David Winfield's and my Dumbarton Oaks Study of The Byzanting Monuments and Topography of the Pontos – alphabetically, not chronologically. In doing so, I was surprised to find how little theoretical discussion there has been on how to treat Byzantine place-names, or what happens when they are transferred from memory to written record (and back again). We can learn from Western medievalists.     

Byzantine History in late Ottoman Turkish Historiography

Abstract

The present Short Note is intended as a brief introduction to a subject which is part of a wider research project on Greek (ancient, Byzantine, and modern) as well as Roman history and culture as described and discussed in Ottoman literature, particularly in late Ottoman historiography. As an attempt to familiarise the reader with, at this stage, no more than a few aspects of the subject in question, the following sketch does not pretend to be exhaustive. It is hoped, however, that it will provide a general idea of the context, as well as of the relevant sources, some of which will be described in more detail. Our note is, in addition, intended to arouse interest, particularly from the point of view of Byzantine and modern Greek studies, and to invite comments.