Byzantine Silk in the World

Our current book project explores the multiple meanings of Byzantine silks over their long lives from creation to modern reception. Because charting cultural responses to silks in their travels across the frontiers of the empire and beyond the temporal boundaries of the medieval era proved methodologically challenging, we developed several approaches in combination. We selected four case studies that represent the diversity of Byzantine silks from the seventh through the eleventh century and the various ways that silks could attest to empire and emperor. Amid our considerations of physical features, including materials and techniques, use, reuse, and visual features, analysis of design emerged as crucial to our study. Inspired in part by the concept of the imaginary, as originally developed in the social sciences, we also address silk in lived experience and behavior, collective memory, and symbolism. Close consideration of these material artifacts and their changing historical contexts yields clues to shared world views and differing cultural responses among elites and royal courts across Afro-Eurasia; so, too, consideration of the modern studies that this project is built on clarifies modern interpretive frameworks reflected in academic studies and museum practices of collecting and displaying silk. In this panel, we discuss how our project attempts to yoke physical and conceptual considerations, historical and modern, to ground an art history of Byzantine silks in the world.