Byzantinists have been debating the character of the medieval Roman ethnic identities and the nature of their political community. These debates easily slide into head-counting and gatekeeping, without methodological or theoretical considerations of what it meant to exist and act as a collective entity. Simultaneously, the customary narrative form of modern historiography favors individual subjects—human or institutional—further obscuring Byzantine ways of communal existence. This session focuses on methodological reflections around issues of collective subjectivity and agency in Byzantium by examining intersecting medieval communities based on cohabitation, common labor, space, political practices, class, language, gender, and social kinship. Subjectivity is seen as the precondition of specific identities, thus fostering a broad discussion across periods and disciplines. Contributors examine the notions and themes of Byzantine pastoralism, religious and seasonal collectivity, Constantinopolitan collective memory places, collective agency and light in village churches and theoretical approaches to pre-modern multitudes. The speakers consider how the difference between individual and collective subjects is conceptualized in medieval sources and modern narratives of Byzantium. Do collective subjects have the same traits as the individual ones, merely multiplied or amplified? Are collectives always reducible to a group of individuals? Are they akin to physical masses? Must these entities be durable, fixed over time, and possess stable ‘membership’ to be legible? How can we perceive and interpret Byzantium beyond its elite individuals and formal institutions?
In Late Medieval Byzantine and Serbian charters, the term “katouna” or “katun” refers to a typically transhumant pastoral community recognized by political authorities as a legal entity, liable to having specific rights and obligations vis-à-vis the ruler and/or large landowners. Common to both the Byzantine and South Slavic spheres, it served as an institutional framework…
This paper takes as its subject the icons and especially statues of Constantinople: the thousands of beings of bronze, stone, and paint that inhabited the city alongside humans. It examines the impact of these ostensibly inanimate objects upon a living population that, from 326 to 1204, not only encountered them on a daily basis but…
At the outset of the new millennium Michael Hardt and the late Antonio Negri’s seminal Empire was proclaimed ‘the communist manifesto for the twenty first century’. Presenting a fundamental reframing of Marxist understandings of new political and economic conditions of “globalisation”, the authors integrated the insights of radical postmodern thinkers such as Foucault, Deleuze and…
This talk offers a new perspective on one of the most securely established collective identities in Byzantium—the church, with a focus on provincial urban communities in the twelfth century. It has long been clear that bishops served as focal points within the collective life of the rapidly growing cities of this era, not only representing…