Knowledge Construction in Late Antiquity

Knowledge Construction in Late Antiquity PDF

Author: Monika Amsler

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2023-04-03

Total Pages: 479

ISBN-13: 3111011046

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Social Studies of the sciences have long analyzed and exposed the constructed nature of knowledge. Pioneering studies of knowledge production in laboratories (e.g., Latour/Woolgar 1979; Knorr-Cetina 1981) have identified factors that affect processes that lead to the generation of scientific data and their subsequent interpretation, such as money, training and curriculum, location and infrastructure, biography-based knowledge and talent, and chance. More recent theories of knowledge construction have further identified different forms of knowledge, such as tacit, intuitive, explicit, personal, and social knowledge. These theoretical frameworks and critical terms can help reveal and clarify the processes that led to ancient data gathering, information and knowledge production. The contributors use late-antique hermeneutical associations as means to explore intuitive or even tacit knowledge; they appreciate mistakes as a platform to study the value of personal knowledge and its premises; they think about rows and tables, letter exchanges, and schools as platforms of distributed cognition; they consider walls as venues for social knowledge production; and rethink the value of social knowledge in scholarly genealogies—then and now.

Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean World

Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean World PDF

Author: Jelle Bruning

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-12-31

Total Pages: 525

ISBN-13: 1009170015

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Maps Egypt's political, economic and cultural connections throughout the Mediterranean and beyond between 500 and 1000 CE.

Global Byzantium

Global Byzantium PDF

Author: Leslie Brubaker

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-07-29

Total Pages: 536

ISBN-13: 100062448X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Global Byzantium is, in part, a recasting and expansion of the old ‘Byzantium and its neighbours’ theme with, however, a methodological twist away from the resolutely political and toward the cultural and economic. A second thing that Global Byzantium – as a concept – explicitly endorses is comparative methodology. Global Byzantium needs also to address three further issues: cultural capital, the importance of the local, and the empire’s strategic geographical location. Cultural capital: in past decades it was fashionable to define Byzantium as culturally superior to western Christian Europe, and Byzantine influence was a key concept, especially in art historical circles. This concept has been increasingly criticised, and what we now see emerging is a comparative methodology that relies on the concept of ‘competitive sharing’, not blind copying but rather competitive appropriation. The importance of the local is equally critical. We need to talk more about what the Byzantines saw when they ‘looked out’, and what others saw in Byzantium when they ‘looked in’ and to think about how that impacted on our, very post-modern, concepts of globalism. Finally, we need to think about the empire’s strategic geographical position: between the fourth and the thirteenth centuries, if anyone was travelling internationally, they had to travel across (or along the coasts of) the Byzantine Empire. Byzantium was thus a crucial intermediary, for good or for ill, between Europe, Africa, and Asia – effectively, the glue that held the Christian world together, and it was also a critical transit point between the various Islamic polities and the Christian world.

Damqatum - Number 19 (2023)

Damqatum - Number 19 (2023) PDF

Author: Jorge Cano Moreno

Publisher: CEHAO

Published: 2023-12-31

Total Pages: 62

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Damqatum is a journal dedicated to the history and archaeology of the Near East, oriented to the general public.

Mobility and Migration in Byzantium: A Sourcebook

Mobility and Migration in Byzantium: A Sourcebook PDF

Author: Claudia Rapp

Publisher: V&R unipress

Published: 2023-06-12

Total Pages: 501

ISBN-13: 3737013411

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Mobility and migration were not uncommon in Byzantium, as is true for all societies. Yet, scholarship is only beginning to pay attention to these phenomena. This book presents in English translation a wide array of relevant source texts from ca. 650 to ca. 1450 originally written in medieval Greek: from administrative records, saints’ lives and letters by churchmen to ego-documents by ambassadors and historical narratives by court historians. Each source text is accompanied by a detailed introduction, commentary and further bibliography, thus making the book accessible to both scholars and students and laying the groundwork for future research on the internal dynamics of Byzantine society.

Holiness on the Move: Mobility and Space in Byzantine Hagiography

Holiness on the Move: Mobility and Space in Byzantine Hagiography PDF

Author: Mihail Mitrea

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-12-30

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 1000833135

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Holiness on the Move: Mobility and Space in Byzantine Hagiography explores the literary, religious, and social functions of monastic mobility in Byzantine hagiography, touching on aspects of space, narrative, and identity. The ten chapters included in this volume highlight the multifaceted and rich nature of travel narratives, exploring topics such as authorship and audience, narrative structure and function, identity-making and practicalities of and discourse on travel. In terms of geographical span, the case studies cover Constantinople and its hinterland, Asia Minor, mainland Greece, Trebizond, the Balkans, and southern Italy and range chronologically from the end of the sixth to the fourteenth century. The contributions offer novel insights and perspectives on the importance of mobility in the literary construction of holiness in the Byzantine world and the wider medieval Mediterranean, the spatial dimension of sacred mobility, and the ways in which mobility is employed in the narrative construction of hagiographical texts. As such, the volume joins the burgeoning research on sacred mobilities and will interest students and scholars of Byzantine and medieval literature, religion, and history, as well as a wider readership with an interest in the study of space and mobility.

The Paulicians

The Paulicians PDF

Author: Carl Dixon

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2022-05-16

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 9004517081

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In a searching challenge to the paradigm of medieval Christian dualism, this study reenvisions the Paulicians as largely conventional Christians engendered by complex socio-religious forces in the borderlands of Armenia and Asia Minor.

Witness Literature in Byzantium

Witness Literature in Byzantium PDF

Author: Adam J. Goldwyn

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-08-06

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 3030788571

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This book analyzes Byzantine examples of witness literature, a genre that focuses on eyewitness accounts written by slaves, prisoners, refugees, and other victims of historical atrocity. It focuses on such episodes in three nonfictional texts – John Kaminiates’ Capture of Thessaloniki (904), Eustathios of Thessaloniki’s Capture of Thessaloniki (1186), and Niketas Choniates’ History (ca. 1204–17) – and the three extant twelfth-century Komnenian novels to consider how the authors’ positions as both eyewitness and victim require an interpretive method that distinguishes witness literature from other kinds of writing about the past. Drawing on theoretical developments in the fields of Holocaust and Genocide Studies (such as Giorgio Agamben’s homo sacer and Michel Foucault’s biopolitics) and comparisons with modern examples (Elie Wiesel’s Night and Primo Levi’s If This is a Man), Witness Literature emphasizes the affective, subjective, and experiential in medieval Greek historical writing.

Visions of Community in the Post-Roman World

Visions of Community in the Post-Roman World PDF

Author: Dr Richard Payne

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2013-07-28

Total Pages: 883

ISBN-13: 1409483223

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This volume looks at 'visions of community' in a comparative perspective, from Late Antiquity to the dawning of the age of crusades. It addresses the question of why and how distinctive new political cultures developed after the disintegration of the Roman World, and to what degree their differences had already emerged in the first post-Roman centuries. The Latin West, Orthodox Byzantium and its Slavic periphery, and the Islamic world each retained different parts of the Graeco-Roman heritage, while introducing new elements. For instance, ethnicity became a legitimizing element of rulership in the West, remained a structural element of the imperial periphery in Byzantium, and contributed to the inner dynamic of Islamic states without becoming a resource of political integration. Similarly, the political role of religion also differed between the emerging post-Roman worlds. Anybody interested in the development of the post-Roman Mediterranean, but also in the relationship between the Islamic World and the West, will gain new insights from these studies on the political role of ethnicity and religion.