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The first comparative, cross-cultural study of medieval illustrated histories that engages in a direct, confrontational dialogue with Byzantine historical memory.
Studies the interrelation of sight, touch, and the imagination in ancient and medieval Greek theories of perception and cognition.
Byzantium the other. Byzantium the pompous. Byzantium the eternal. The mere existence of this empire with his rich history and otherness from western European traditions spurred the minds of scholars, noblemen, politicians and ordinary people throughout its survival and long beyond its final downfall in 1453. Neglecting its great political and cultural influence on neighbouring countries and beyond, Enlightenment writers stripped Byzantium of its original historical reality and thus created a model, which could be utilised in very different constructs, stretching from positive to absolutely negative connotations. With the rise of new nationalisms, primarily in Eastern and Southeastern Europe, and the associated politically inspired historical (re)constructions in the 19th and 20th century, the reception of Byzantium gained new facets, its perception reached into new dimensions. In this volume, we would like to shed some light on these patterns and the problems they entail, and show the different ways in which?Byzantium± was used as an argument in nation-building and in constructing new historiographical narratives, and how ist legacy endured in ecclesiastical historiography.
What is the contemporary cultural legacy of Byzantium or The Eastern Roman Empire? This book explores the varied reception history of the Byzantine Empire across a range of cultural production. Split into four sections: the origins of 'Byzantomania' in France, modern media, literature, and politics, it provides case studies which show the numerous ways in which the empire's legacy can be felt today. Covering television, video games and contemporary political discourse, contributors also consider a wide range of national and geographical perspectives including Russian, Turkish, Polish, Greek and Hungarian. It will be essential reading for scholars and students of the reception and cultural history of the Byzantine Empire.
This collection of studies on Dreams, Memory and Imagination in Byzantium covers four main themes: the place of dreams, imagination and memory in the Byzantine philosophical tradition; the political uses of prophetic dreams and visions in imperial contexts; the appearance and manipulation of dreams and memory in Byzantine poetry and histories, and changing commemorations of the saints over time in art, epigraphy and literature. These studies reveal the distinctive and important roles of memory, imagination and dreams in the Byzantine court, the proto-Orthodox church and broader society from Constantinople to Syria and beyond. This volume of Byzantina Australiensia brings together the work of senior and early career scholars from Australia, Greece, Israel, Italy, Japan, New Zealand and the United States.
Two lavish, illustrated histories confronted and contested the Byzantine model of empire. The Madrid Skylitzes was created at the court of Roger II of Sicily in the mid-twelfth century. The Vatican Manasses was produced for Ivan Alexander of Bulgaria in the mid-fourteenth century. Through close analysis of how each chronicle was methodically manipulated, this study argues that Byzantine history was selectively re-imagined to suit the interests of outsiders. The Madrid Skylitzes foregrounds regicides, rebellions, and palace intrigue in order to subvert the divinely ordained image of order that Byzantine rulers preferred to project. The Vatican Manasses presents Byzantium as a platform for the accession of Ivan Alexander to the throne of the Third Rome, the last and final world-empire. Imagining the Byzantine Past demonstrates how distinct visions of empire generated diverging versions of Byzantium's past in the aftermath of the Crusades.
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.
What is the contemporary cultural legacy of Byzantium or The Eastern Roman Empire? This book explores the varied reception history of the Byzantine Empire across a range of cultural production. Split into four sections: the origins of 'Byzantomania' in France, modern media, literature, and politics, it provides case studies which show the numerous ways in which the empire's legacy can be felt today. Covering television, video games and contemporary political discourse, contributors also consider a wide range of national and geographical perspectives including Russian, Turkish, Polish, Greek and Hungarian. It will be essential reading for scholars and students of the reception and cultural history of the Byzantine Empire.
The twelve studies contained in this second collection by Henry Maguire are linked together by a common theme, namely the relationship of Byzantine art to the imaginary. They show how art enabled the Byzantines not only to imagine the sacred events of the past, but also to visualize the invisible present by manifesting the spiritual world that they could not see. The articles are grouped around the following five topics: the depiction of nature by the Byzantines before and after iconoclasm, especially in portrayals of the earthly and the spiritual Paradise; the social functions and theological significance of classical artistic forms in Byzantine art after iconoclasm; the association between rhetoric and the visual arts in Byzantium, especially in contrast to the role played by liturgical drama in western medieval art; the relationship of the visual arts to Byzantine concepts of justice and the law, both human and divine; and portrayals of the two Byzantine courts, the imperial court on earth and the imagined court in heaven. The papers cover a wide range of media, including floor and wall mosaics, paintings in manuscripts and churches, ivory carvings, coins, and enamel work.