This volume offers an overview of the rich narrative material circulating in the medieval Mediterranean. As a multilingual and multicultural zone, the Eastern Mediterranean offered a broad market for tales in both oral and written form and longer works of fiction, which were translated and reworked in order to meet the tastes and cultural expectations of new audiences, thus becoming common intellectual property of all the peoples around the Mediterranean shores. Among others, the volume examines for the first time popular eastern tales, such as Kalila and Dimna, Sindbad, Barlaam and Joasaph,...

This volume offers an overview of Byzantine manuscript illustration, a central branch of Byzantine art and culture. Just like written texts, illustrations bear witness to Byzantine material culture, imperial ideology and religious beliefs, as well as to the development and spread of Byzantine art. In this sense illustrated books reflect the society that produced and used them. Being portable, they could serve as diplomatic gifts or could be acquired by foreigners. In such cases they became "emissaries" of Byzantine art and culture in Western Europe and the Arabic world. The volume provides...

This collection of essays on the Byzantine culture of war in the period between the 4th and the 12th centuries offers a new critical approach to the study of warfare as a fundamental aspect of East Roman society and culture in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. The book’s main goal is to provide a critical overview of current research as well as new insights into the role of military organization as a distinct form of social power in one of history’s more long-lived empires. The various chapters consider the political, ideological, practical, institutional and organizational aspects of...

Few Roman emperors enjoy such fame as Flavius Claudius Iulianus – although he was sole ruler of the Roman Empire for only eighteen months (361-363). Since his early death he has been known as Julian the Apostate – the nephew of Constantine the Great who in vain tried to reverse the transformation of the Imperium Romanum into a Christian Empire. This companion synthesizes research on Julian conducted in many languages over the last decades and develops new perspectives. The authors scrutinize the voluminous and variegated sources for Julian's life and rule and reflect on the perceptions...

Science in Byzantium has rarely been systematically explored. A first of its kind, this collection of essays highlights the disciplines, achievements, and contexts of Byzantine science across the eleven centuries of the Byzantine empire. After an introduction on science in Byzantium and the 21st century, and a study of Christianization and the teaching of science in Byzantium, it offers a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of the scientific disciplines cultivated in Byzantium, from the exact to the natural sciences, medicine, polemology, and the occult sciences. The volume showcases the...

A Companion to Byzantine Epistolography introduces and contextualizes the culture of Byzantine letter-writing from various socio-historical, material and literary angles. While this culture was long regarded as an ivory-tower pastime of intellectual elites, the eighteen essays in this volume, authored by leading experts in the field, show that epistolography had a vital presence in many areas of Byzantine society, literature and art. The chapters offer discussions of different types of letters and intersections with non-epistolary genres, their social functions as media of communication and...

This volume provides an overview of the development of the Patriarchate of Constantinople from Late Antiquity to the Early Ottoman period (4th to 15th c.). It highlights continuities and changes in the organizational, dogmatic, and intellectual framework of the central ecclesiastical institution of the Byzantine Empire in the face of political and religious upheavals. The volume pays attention to the relations of the Patriarchate with other churches in the West and in the East. Across the disciplinary divide between Byzantine and Ottoman studies, the volume explains the longevity of the...