Historians of the later Roman Empire are increasingly moving away from the terminology of “Byzantine” and “Byzantium” to describe the polity they study, in part due to recognition of how the rubric of “Byzantium” has functioned. “Byzantium” has been useful for maintaining a distinction between a religious medieval and supposedly secular antiquity, for making western Europeans the true heirs of antiquity and enabling the ‘Renaissance,’ for maintaining imagined ethic continuities, for providing models of Orthodox empire, for upholding Western European ascendency as natural, and for constructing the West as rational, freedom-loving, advancing, upstanding, fair, creative, dominating, and masculine. Scholars who do not wish to uphold these outmoded historical schemas are thinking through the benefits of dropping the “Byzantine” label. For historians whose subject is defined politically by the Roman polity, the option of adopting the emic vocabulary of “Roman” is readily at hand. The approach of calling the people that they study by the names those people called themselves, with occasionally an initial adjective signaling which particular era and territory of the Roman polity is under discussion, seems to be clearer, less distorting, less derogatory, and more truthful than calling them “Byzantines.” Yet for fields such as the history of art, in which changes in style, rather than politics, underlie major divisions, there may be more challenges involved in giving up the rubric of “Byzantium.” This conversation will consider the relative benefits and difficulties that the “Byzantine” terminology brings to the fields of art history, archaeology, and material culture. The participants will bring their varying perspectives of working in archaeology, art history, literary culture, both in the center and peripheries of the later Roman polity to bear on these questions. Together we will discuss what may be gained and lost by moving the study of art and culture “Beyond Byzantium.”
Until fairly recently, Egyptian Christian visual culture has been considered peripheral and substandard, made by Christians called Copts. Remembering that Egypt was one of the wealthiest provinces in the Empire, and examining racial and nationalist agendas with a critical eye, it is clear that Egypt played a major role in the complex process that was…
Museums have long been central to the construction of “Byzantium” as an art-historical category. Through taxonomies of style, spatial hierarchies in galleries, and narratives tethered to Western medievalism and Renaissance exceptionalism, museum practice has played a key role in separating the Eastern Roman Empire from the Roman world it claimed and the global networks it…
What is “Byzantine” Art? Is it artistic production undertaken within the geographic boundaries of the “Byzantine” Empire? Or is it an artistic style – a set of formal principles and qualities – untethered to a particular place or time, to a particular cultural or political group? Historians have devised persuasive arguments for abandoning the term…