Strangers to Themselves: The Byzantine Outsider

Ashgate
edited by Dion C. Smythe
ISBN: 0860788148
price: $79.95   hardcover

March 1998 saw Byzantinists gathering together at the University of Sussex in Brighton, for the annual symposium held by the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies. Their aim was to consider the question of the "Byzantine outsider."
Some categories of outsiders appear clear and simple: those marked out by class, race, sex, religion. But these categories are not universals. Today, historians of all periods are examining the ways in which we analyze the divisions in our societies, which can determine how we look at societies in the past. There is no consensus on who forms the "outsider class" in modern society; it should come as no surprise that there was no consensus in Byzantium as to who the outsiders were, what they had done to deserve that status, and what the result of their attaining it should have been.
The papers in this collection, drawn from the large number presented at the XXXII Spring Symposium, continue the debate about the idea of the "Byzantine outsider". The scholars within -- theologians, historians, literary critics and art historians -- present differing approaches to different aspects of the problem. The volume does not aim to have the "last word," but rather to provoke debate and to open the field. Any examination of society that uses the concept of the outsider has implicitly within it a concept of the "insider." By looking at those on the margins it becomes easier to see who were -- or at least thought they were -- on the inside.
Contents: Preface; The "other" in Byzantium, M.E. Mullett; Aliens and citizens of elsewhere; xeniteia in East Christian monastic literature, J. McGuckin; Byzantine asceticism-a stranger to the church?, J. Rutherford; Middle Byzantine "Tours of Hell:" outsider theodicy?, J. Baun; John of Phoberou: a voice crying in the wilderness, R.H. Jordan; The hermit as a stranger in the desert, N. Ševcenko; Exclues et aliénées: les femmes dans la tradition cononique Byzantine, J. Beaucamp; Hebrews, Greeks or Romans? Jewish culture and identity in Byzantium, N. de Lange; The engima of the Romaniote (Jewish-Byzantine) tombs, H. Jacobsohn; The Byzantine outsider in trade (c.900-c.1350), D. Jacoby; Constantinople and the outside world, P. Magdalino; Patron imagery from the fringes of the empire, L. Rodley; The world of fiction and the world "out there:" the case of the Byzantine novel, R. Beaton; Akritis and outsiders, E. Jeffereys; Defining the foreign in Kekaumenos, C. Roueché; Procupios the outsider?, G. Greatrex; Foreigners in tenth-century Byzantium: a contribution to the history of cultural encounter, L. Simeonova; Byzantine conceptions of otherness after the annexation of Bulgaria (1018), P. Stephenson; Conclusion, R. Cormack; Index.