• The lactating woman : breastfeeding and motherhood in antiquity and early Byzantium / Stavroula Constantinou and Aspasia Skouroumouni-Stavrinou
• Breast rules : the body of the wet nurse in ancient and early Byzantine discourses / Stavroula Constantinou and Aspasia Skouroumouni-Stavrinou
• The breast as locus for punishment / Dionysios Stathakopoulos
• Breastmilk as a therapeutic agent in ancient, late antique, and early Byzantine medical literature / Petros Bouras-Vallianatos
• Weaning and lactation cessation in late antiquity and the early Byzantine period : medical advice in context / Laurence Totelin
• "Galaktology" and genre : simple literary forms on milk and breastfeeding in ancient and early Byzantine medical treatises / Stavroula Constantinou and Aspasia Skouroumouni-Stavrinou
• Images of breastfeeding in early Byzantine art : form
• context
• function / Maria Parani
• Empowering breasts : women, widows, and prophetesses-with-child at Dura-Europos / Barbara Crostini
• Roman charity : Nonnos of Panopolis, support for parents, and questions of gender / Tim Parkin
• Children in distress : agonizing mothers as intercessors in early Byzantine miracle collections / Andria Andreou.

"This volume offers the first comparative, interdisciplinary, and intercultural examination of the lactating woman - biological mother and othermother - in antiquity and early Byzantium. Adopting methodologies and knowledge deriving from a variety of disciplines, the volume's contributors investigate the close interrelationship between a woman and her lactating breasts, as well as the social, ideological, theological, and medical meanings and uses of motherhood, childbirth, and breastfeeding, along with their visual and literary representations. Breastfeeding and the work of mothering are explored through the study of a great variety of sources, mainly works of Greek-speaking cultures, written and visual, anonymous and eponymous, which were mostly produced between the first and the seventh century AD. Due to their multiple interdisciplinary dimensions, ancient and early Byzantine lactating women are approached through three interconnected thematic strands having a twofold focus: society and ideology, medicine and practice, and art and literature. By developing the model of the lactating woman, the volume offers a new analytical framework for understanding a significant part of the still unwritten cultural history of the period. At the same time, the volume significantly contributes to the emerging fields of breast and motherhood studies. The new and significant knowledge generated in the fields of ancient and Byzantine studies may also prove useful for cultural historians in general and other disciplines, such as literary studies, art history, history of medicine, philosophy, theology, sociology, anthropology and gender studies"-- Provided by publisher.

"Byzantinists entered the study of emotion with Henry Maguire's ground-breaking article on sorrow, published in 1977. Since then, classicists and western medievalists have developed new ways of understanding how emotional communities work and where the ancients' concepts of emotion differ from our own, and Byzantinists have begun to consider emotions other than sorrow. It is time to look at what is distinctive about Byzantine emotion. This volume is the first to look at the constellation of Byzantine emotions. Originating at an international colloquium at Dumbarton Oaks, these papers address issues such as power, gender, rhetoric, or asceticism in Byzantine society through the lens of a single emotion or cluster of emotions. Contributors focus not only on the construction of emotions with respect to perception and cognition but also explore how emotions were communicated and exchanged across broad (multi)linguistic, political and social boundaries. Priorities are twofold: to arrive at an understanding of what the Byzantines thought of as emotions and to comprehend how theory shaped their appraisal of reality. Managing Emotion in Byzantium will appeal to researchers and students alike interested in Byzantine perceptions of emotion, Byzantine Culture, and medieval perceptions of emotion"-- Provided by publisher.

• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Before Iconoclasm and its Early Echoes (680s-750s)
• Chapter 2. Words, Images, and Religious Practices in the Iconophile Discourse (754-790s)
• Chapter 3. Textual Icons. Iconophile Thinking and Preaching in Central Italy
• Chapter 4. A Glimpse of Salvation. Christ as Light
• Chapter 5. Christ Child - the Lamb of God - on the Altar
• Chapter 6. Figuring Intercession. The Assumption of Mary
• Appendix 1. Mary as Queen of Heaven
• Appendix 2. Mary as Gate of Heaven and Ladder to Heaven
• Epilogue.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Between the late seventh and the mid-ninth centuries, a debate about sacred images - conventionally addressed as 'Byzantine iconoclasm' - engaged monks, emperors, and popes in the Mediterranean area and on the European continent. The importance of this debate cannot be overstated; it challenged the relation between image, text, and belief. A series of popes staunchly in favour of sacred images acted consistently during this period in displaying a remarkable iconophilia or 'love for images'. Their multifaceted reaction involved not only council resolutions and diplomatic exchanges, but also public religious festivals, liturgy, preaching, and visual arts - the mass-media of the time. Embracing these tools, the popes especially promoted themes related to the Incarnation of God - which justified the production and veneration of sacred images - and extolled the role and the figure of the Virgin Mary. Despite their profound influence over Byzantine and western cultures of later centuries, the political, theological, and artistic interactions between the East and the West during this period have not yet been investigated in studies combining textual and material evidence. By drawing evidence from texts and material culture - some of which have yet to be discussed against the background of the iconoclastic controversy - and by considering the role of oral exchange, Iconophilia assesses the impact of the debate on sacred images and of coeval theological controversies in Rome and central Italy. By looking at intersecting textual, liturgical, and pictorial images which had at their core the Incarnate God and his human mother Mary, the book demonstrates that between c.680-880, by unremittingly maintaining the importance of the visual for nurturing beliefs and mediating personal and communal salvation, the popes ensured that the status of sacred images would remain unchallenged, at least until the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

'Magisterial - an outstanding book that shines a bright light on one of the most important, interesting and under-studied cities in European history. A masterpiece.' Peter Frankopan 'A wonderful new history of the Mediterranean from the fifth to eighth centuries through a lens focussed on Ravenna, gracefully and clearly written, which reconceptualizes what was "East" and what was "West".' Caroline Goodson 'A masterwork by one of our greatest historians of Byzantium and early Christianity. Judith Herrin tells a story that is at once gripping and authoritative and full of wonderful detail about every element in the life of Ravenna. Impossible to put down.' David Freedberg In 402 AD, after invading tribes broke through the Alpine frontiers of Italy and threatened the imperial government in Milan, the young Emperor Honorius made the momentous decision to move his capital to a small, easy defendable city in the Po estuary - Ravenna. From then until 751 AD, Ravenna was first the capital of the Western Roman Empire, then that of the immense kingdom of Theoderic the Goth and finally the centre of Byzantine power in Italy. In this engrossing account Judith Herrin explains how scholars, lawyers, doctors, craftsmen, cosmologists and religious luminaries were drawn to Ravenna where they created a cultural and political capital that dominated northern Italy and the Adriatic. As she traces the lives of Ravenna's rulers, chroniclers and inhabitants, Herrin shows how the city became the meeting place of Greek, Latin, Christian and barbarian cultures and the pivot between East and West. The book offers a fresh account of the waning of Rome, the Gothic and Lombard invasions, the rise of Islam and the devastating divisions within Christianity. It argues that the fifth to eighth centuries should not be perceived as a time of decline from antiquity but rather, thanks to Byzantium, as one of great creativity - the period of 'Early Christendom'. These were the formative centuries of Europe. While Ravenna's palaces have crumbled, its churches have survived. In them, Catholic Romans and Arian Goths competed to produce an unrivalled concentration of spectacular mosaics, many of which still astonish visitors today. Beautifully illustrated with specially commissioned photographs, and drawing on the latest archaeological and documentary discoveries, Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe brings the early Middle Ages to life through the history of this dazzling city.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Forward
• David Konstan.- INTRODUCTION.- 1. Towards an Approach to Gendered Emotions in Byzantine Culture: An Introduction
• Mati Meyer.- PART I.- 2. `Emotioning' Gender: Plotting the Male and the Female in Byzantine Greek Passions and Lives of Holy Couples
• Andria Andreou.- 3. Pity and Lamentation in the Authorial Personae of John Kaminiates and Anna Komnene
• Leonora Neville.- 4. Gendering Grief: Emotional Eunuchs - Consoling Constantine the Paphlagonian
• Shaun Tougher.- PART II.- 5. Justifiably Angry or Simply Angry?: Empresses in Byzantine Society
• Andriani Georgiou.- 6. Emotions on Stage: The `Manly' Woman Martyr in the Menologion of Basil II
• Valentina Cantone.- PART III.- 7. Eros as Passion, Affection and Nature: Gendered Perceptions of Erotic Emotion in Byzantium
• Charis Messis and Ingela Nilsson.- 8. `Weaver of Tales': The Veroli Box and the Power of Eros in Byzantium
• Diliana Angelova.- 9. Stirring up Sundry Emotions in the Byzantine Illuminated Book: Reflections on the Female Body
• Mati Meyer.- CONCLUSIONS.- 10. Gendered Emotions and Affective Genders: A Response
• Stavroula Constantinou.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

This book examines the gendered dimensions of emotions and the emotional aspects of gender within Byzantine culture and suggests possible readings of such instances. In so doing, the volume celebrates the current breadth of Byzantine gender studies while at the same time contributing to the emerging field of Byzantine emotion studies. It offers the reader an array of perspectives encompassing various sources and media, including historiography, hagiography, theological writings, epistolography, erotic literature, art objects, and illuminated manuscripts. The ten chapters cover a time span ranging from the early to the late Byzantine periods. This diversity is secured by an expanded and enriched exploration of the collection's unifying theme of gendered emotions. The scope and breadth of the chapters also reflect the ways in which Byzantine gender and emotion have been studied thus far, while at the same time offering novel approaches that challenge established opinions in Byzantine studies.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Intellect of the Hand
• Chapter 2: Building Ornament
• Chapter 3: Occupied Objects
• Chapter 4: Material Metaphors
• Chapter 5: The Poetics of Ornament Conclusion: Objects in an Expanded Field Bibliography Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

The art of the object reached unparalleled heights in the medieval Islamic world, yet the intellectual dimensions of ceramics, metalwares, and other plastic arts in this milieu have not always been acknowledged. Arts of Allusion reveals the object as a crucial site where pre-modern craftsmen of the eastern Mediterranean and Persianate realms engaged in fertile dialogue with poetry, literature, painting, and, perhaps most strikingly, architecture. Lanterns fashioned after miniature shrines, incense burners in the form of domed monuments, earthenware jars articulated with arches and windows, inkwells that allude to tents: through close studies of objects from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, this book reveals that allusions to architecture abound across media in the portable arts of the medieval Islamic world. Arts of Allusion draws upon a broad range of material evidence as well as medieval texts to locate its subjects in a cultural landscape where the material, visual and verbal realms were intertwined. Moving far beyond the initial identification of architectural types with their miniature counterparts in the plastic arts, Margaret Graves develops a series of new frameworks for exploring the intelligent art of the allusive object. These address materiality, representation, and perception, and examine contemporary literary and poetic paradigms of metaphor, description, and indirect reference as tools for approaching the plastic arts. Arguing for the role of the intellect in the applied arts and for the communicative potential of ornament, Arts of Allusion asserts the reinstatement of craftsmanship into Islamic intellectual history.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• ContentsList of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1 Sophia and Choros: The Making of Sacred Space in Byzantium2 Inspiriting in the Byzantine Consecration (Kathierosis) Rite3 Icons of Breath4 Aural Architecture5 Material Flux: Marble, Water, and Chant 6 The Horizontal Mirror and the Poetics of the Imaginary7 Empathy and the Making of Art in ByzantiumConclusionNotesBibliographyIndex.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Experiencing the resonant acoustics of the church of Hagia Sophia allowed the Byzantine participants in its liturgical rituals to be filled with the Spirit of God, and even to become his image on earth. Bissera Pentcheva's vibrant analysis examines how these sung rites combined with the church's architectural space to make Hagia Sophia a performative place of worship representative of Byzantine religious culture in all its sensory richness.Coupling digital acoustic models and video with a close examination of liturgical texts and melodic structures, Pentcheva applies art-historical, philosophical, archeoacoustical, and anthropological methodologies to provide insight into the complementary ways liturgy and location worked to animate worshippers in Byzantium. Rather than focus on the architectural form of the building, the technology of its construction, or the political ideology of its decoration, Pentcheva delves into the performativity of Hagia Sophia and explains how the "icons of sound" created by the sung liturgy and architectural reverberation formed an aural experience that led to mystical transcendence for worshippers, opening access to the imagined celestial sound of the angelic choirs.Immersive, deeply researched, and beautifully illustrated, this exploration of Hagia Sophia sheds new light on sacred space, iconicity, and religious devotion in Byzantium. Scholars of art and architectural history, religious studies, music and acoustics, and the medieval period will especially appreciate Pentcheva's field-advancing work.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

According to legend, the Virgin appeared one Christmas Eve to an artless young man standing in one of Constantinople's most famous Marian shrines. She offered him a scroll of papyrus with the injunction that he swallow it, and following the Virgin's command, he did so. Immediately his voice turned sweet and gentle as he spontaneously intoned his hymn "The Virgin today gives birth." So was born the career of Romanos the Melodist (ca. 485-560), one of the greatest liturgical poets of Byzantium, author of at least sixty long hymns, or kontakia, that were chanted during the night vigils preceding major feasts and festivals. In The Virgin in Song, Thomas Arentzen explores the characterization of Mary in these kontakia and the ways in which the kontakia echoed the cult of the Virgin. He focuses on three key moments in her story as marked in the liturgical calendar: her encounter with Gabriel at the Annunciation, her child's birth at Christmas, and the death of her son on Good Friday. Consistently, Arentzen contends, Romanos counters expectations by shifting emphasis away from Christ himself to focus on Mary-as the subject of the erotic gaze, as a breastfeeding figure of abundance and fertility, and finally as an authoritatively vocal woman who conveys the secrets of her son and the joys of the resurrection. Through his hymns, Romanos inspired an affective relationship between Mary and his audience, bringing the human and the holy into dialogue. By plumbing her emotional depths, the poet traces her process of understanding as she apprehends the mysteries that she embodies. By giving her a powerful voice, he grants subjectivity to a maiden who becomes a mediator. Romanos shaped a figure, Arentzen argues, who related intimately to her flock in a formative period of Christian orthodoxy.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• 1. Repetition: saints, popes, and golden texts
• 2. Transformation: from material church to spiritual body
• 3. Incorporation: becoming a living stone
• 4. Networking: building a communion sanctorum
• Afterword: meaning and presence
• Appendix.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

This book focuses on apse mosaics in Rome, which were commissioned by a series of popes between the sixth and ninth centuries CE. Through a synchronic approach that challenges current conceptions about how works of art interact with historical time, Erik Thuno proposes that the apse mosaics produce an inter-visual network that collapses their chronological succession in time into a continuous present in which the faithful join the saints in the one living body of the Church of Rome. Throughout, this book situates the apse mosaics within the broader context of viewership, the cult of relics, epigraphic tradition, and church ritual while engaging topics concerned with intercession, materiality, repetition and vision.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• 1. Introduction: radiance and reflection: chrysography in Byzantine icons
• 2. The radiance of Byzantine icons: the reinvention of chrysography after iconoclasm
• 3. The introduction of chrysography on Crusader icons
• 4. Icon or altarpiece in the Latin East and Tuscany: innovative panels in the third quarter of the thirteenth century
• 5. Images of the Virgin and Child Hodegetria enthroned with chrysography by central Italian painters: Coppo di Marcovaldo to Guido da Siena
• 6. Images of the Virgin and Child Hodegetria enthroned with chrysography by central Italian painters: Duccio and Cimabue
• 7. Techniques for chrysography in thirteenth-century panel painting Lucy J. Wrapson
• Addendum: chrysography investigation: report summary on XRF tests conducted at the National Gallery of Art on three panels Adele Wright.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

The Virgin and Child Hodegetria was a widely venerated Byzantine image depicting the Virgin holding and pointing to her son as the way to salvation. In this book, Jaroslav Folda traces the appropriation of this image by thirteenth-century Crusader and central Italian painters, where the Virgin Mary is transformed from the human mother of god, the Theotokos, of Byzantine icons, to the resplendent Madonna radiant in her heavenly home with Christ and the angels. This transformation, Folda demonstrates, was brought about by using chrysography, or golden highlighting, which came to be used on both the Virgin and Child. This book shows the important role played by Crusader painters in bringing about this shift and in disseminating the new imagery to Central Italy. By focusing on the Virgin and Child Hodegetria, Folda reveals complex artistic interchanges and influences extending across the Mediterranean from Byzantium and the Holy Land to Italy.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Full-color facsimile of Bibliothèque nationale de France ms. Nouv. acq. lat. 1203. Manuscript was commissioned for the Emperor Charlemagne and his wife Hildegard, and is traditionally considered the earliest known manuscript produced in Charlemagne's Court School in Aachen. It is named for the scribe Godescalc, who wrote and signed it. The manuscript was produced starting on October 7, 781, and completed on April 30, 783.

Liturgical Subjects examines the history of the self in the Byzantine Empire, challenging narratives of Christian subjectivity that focus only on classical antiquity and the Western Middle Ages. As Derek Krueger demonstrates, Orthodox Christian interior life was profoundly shaped by patterns of worship introduced and disseminated by Byzantine clergy. Hymns, prayers, and sermons transmitted complex emotional responses to biblical stories, particularly during Lent. Religious services and religious art taught congregants who they were in relation to God and each other. Focusing on Christian practice in Constantinople from the sixth to eleventh centuries, Krueger charts the impact of the liturgical calendar, the eucharistic rite, hymns for vigils and festivals, and scenes from the life of Christ on the making of Christian selves. Exploring the verse of great Byzantine liturgical poets, including Romanos the Melodist, Andrew of Crete, Theodore the Stoudite, and Symeon the New Theologian, he demonstrates how their compositions offered templates for Christian self-regard and self-criticism, defining the Christian "I." Cantors, choirs, and congregations sang in the first person singular expressing guilt and repentence, while prayers and sermons defined the collective identity of the Christian community as sinners in need of salvation. By examining the way models of selfhood were formed, performed, and transmitted in the Byzantine Empire, Liturgical Subjects adds a vital dimension to the history of the self in Western culture.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Introduction
• The contexts of ekphrasis
• Learning ekphrasis: the progymnasmata
• The subjects of ekphrasis
• Enargeia
• making absent things present
• Phantasia
• memory, imagination and the gallery of the mind
• Ekphrasis and the art of persuasion
• The poetics of ekphrasis: fiction, illusion and meta-ekphrasis
• Conclusion
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

This is a study of ekphrasis, the art of making listeners and readers 'see' in their imagination through words alone, as taught in ancient rhetorical schools and as used by Greek writers of the Imperial period (2nd-6th centuries CE). The author places the practice of ekphrasis within its cultural context, emphasising the importance of the visual imagination in ancient responses to rhetoric, poetry and historiography. By linking the theoretical writings on ekphrasis with ancient theories of imagination and emotion and language, she brings out the persuasive and emotive function of vivid language in the literature of the period.This study also addresses the contrast between the ancient and the modern definitions of the term ekphrasis, underlining the different concepts of language, literature and reader response that distinguish the ancient from the modern approach. In order to explain the ancient understanding of ekphrasis and its place within the larger system of rhetorical training, the study includes a full analysis of the ancient technical sources (rhetorical handbooks, commentaries) which aims to make these accessible to non-specialists.The concluding chapter moves away from rhetorical theory to consider the problems and challenges involved in 'turning listeners into spectators' with a particular focus on the role of ekphrasis within ancient fiction. Attention is also paid to texts that lie at the intersection of the modern and ancient definitions of ekphrasis, such as Philostratos' Imagines and the many ekphraseis of buildings and monuments to be found in Late Antique literature.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Introduction
• Chapter One: Art, Icons, and Their Critics and Defenders Before the Age of Iconoclasm Chapter Two: Byzantine Iconoclasm in the Eighth Century Chapter Three: Art and Art Talk in the West in the First Age of Iconoclasm Chapter Four: The Franks and Nicaea: Opus Caroli Regis Chapter Five: Tradition, Order, and Worship in the Age of Charlemagne Chapter Six: The Age of Second Iconoclasm Chapter Seven: Art and Argument in the Age of Louis the Pious
• Conclusion
• Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

In the year 726 C.E., the Byzantine emperor Leo III issued an edict declaring images to be idols, forbidden by Exodus, and ordering all such images in churches to be destroyed. Thus commenced the first wave of Byzantine iconoclasm, which ran its violent course until 787, when the underlying issues were temporarily resolved at the Second Council of Nicaea. In 815, a second great wave of iconoclasm was set off, only to end in 842 when the icons were restored to the churches of the East and the iconoclasts excommunicated. The iconoclast controversies have long been understood as marking major fissures between the Western and Eastern churches. Thomas F. X. Noble reveals that the lines of division were not so clear. It is traditionally maintained that the Carolingians in the 790s did not understand the basic issues involved in the Byzantine dispute. Noble contends that there was, in fact, a significant Carolingian controversy about visual art and, if its ties to Byzantine iconoclasm were tenuous, they were also complex and deeply rooted in central concerns of the Carolingian court. Furthermore, he asserts that the Carolingians made distinctive and original contributions to the whole debate over religious art. Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians is the first book to provide a comprehensive study of the Western response to Byzantine iconoclasm. By comparing art-texts with laws, letters, poems, and other sources, Noble reveals the power and magnitude of the key discourses of the Carolingian world during its most dynamic and creative decades.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Sitting the miniatures: imagery in the ninth century
• 2. The miniatures: internal evidence
• 3. The biographical miniatures: toward image as exegesis
• 4. Basil I and visual panegyric
• 5. The patriarch Photios and visual exegesis
• 6. Mission, martyrdom and visual polemic
• 7. Perceptions of divinity
• 8. Iconography
• 9. Conclusions
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

The Byzantines used imagery to communicate a wide range of issues. In the context of Iconoclasm - the debate about the legitimacy of religious art conducted between c. AD 730 and 843 - Byzantine authors themselves claimed that visual images could express certain ideas better than words. Vision and Meaning in Ninth-Century Byzantium deals with how such visual communication worked and examines the types of messages that pictures could convey in the aftermath of Iconoclasm. Its focus is on a deluxe manuscript commissioned around 880, a copy of the fourth-century sermons of the Cappadocian church father Gregory of Nazianzus which presented to the Emperor Basil I, founder of the Macedonian dynasty, by one of the greatest scholars Byzantium ever produced, the patriarch Photios. The manuscript was lavishly decorated with gilded initials, elaborate headpieces and a full-page miniature before each of Gregory's sermons. Forty-six of these, including over 200 distinct scenes, survive. Fewer than half however were directly inspired by the homily that they accompany. Instead most function as commentaries on the ninth-century court and carefully deconstructed both provide us with information not available from preserved written sources and perhaps more important show us how visual images communicate differently from words.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)