One would readily wonder what could be so exciting about one more, rather academic, article on history. Well... certainly these two excerpts below as well as the title of one of the books reviewed: Byzantine matters 1. And when Rome falls, it is, of course, our Rome, the Rome of the West, that holds our melancholy attention. We find it difficult to admit that another Rome should have survived for a further thousand years, constantly reinventing itself, despite progressive downsizing, with the same tenacity and skill as its architects and craftsmen recycled the vast chunks of purple stone that lay to hand in Constantinople and in the other cities of the eastern Mediterranean. To do so would be to complicate this narrow image of ourselves. Altogether, Byzantium does not fit into current narratives of the history of Europe because if it did, we would have to abandon too many of the tinny certainties that make up our own neat view of the origins of modern Europe. 2. What emerges, above all, from Byzantine Matters is a thousand years of an empire long seen in narrow perspective that is rendered more flexible and exciting at every turn. Things are not what they seem. In Byzantine theology, ancient rigidities are revealed to be responses to incessant questioning. As for Byzantine society—the Western image of Byzantium as a place of “autocracy, bureaucracy, deviousness, and a stultifying lack of originality” has been overturned from the bottom up. Here was a society where learning was respected; where intense competitiveness was the norm; and where a remarkable degree of acceptance of hybridity (in populations as in ideas) enabled an empire “to administer and exploit diversity” in such a way as to reinvent itself, each generation in a different manner, for over a millennium. Such novel perspectives warm the mind.
Posted on: Mon, 08 Dec 2014 06:47:35 +0000
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