BYZANTINE CHRISTIANITY:
A People's History of
Christianity, vol. 3
edited by Derek Krueger
This volume of A People's History of Christianity, dedicated to Byzantine Christianity, explores the practices of lay Christians during the eleven centuries between the foundation of the city of Constantinople in 324 and its fall to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. Lasting from late antiquity to the threshold of the early modern period, the Byzantine Empire began as the eastern half of the Roman Empire and ended as a small medieval state.
In the intervening centuries, Byzantine Christianity developed as a distinct system of religious practice and devotion, different from the medieval Roman Catholicism emerging simultaneously farther west. While some doctrinal issues divided the Orthodox East and the Catholic West, most differences stemmed from cultural practices. Different ways of performing Christianity produced separate identities for these two groups of medieval Christians. Even as their empire shrank, Byzantine emperors and churchmen exported their Eastern Orthodoxy to neighboring peoples. The direct heirs of Byzantine Christianity remain numerous among Greeks, Slavs, Arabs, and others to this day. Today there are more than 200 million Orthodox Christians worldwide.
This volume introduces the religion of the Byzantine Christian laity by asking the question, "What did Byzantine Christians do?" To answer, we must consider how people prayed and how often they attended services; how they celebrated, married, and mourned; how they interacted with priests, monks, nuns, and holy people; where they went on pilgrimage and why they visited shrines; how they transmitted religious values to their children; and how they performed acts of charity. Indeed, questions about what ordinary Christians did in church or in their homes or workshops, about their veneration of saints or their use of icons, about their visual and material culture, and the place of religion in the course of their lives illuminate a people's Christianity.
Many western readers tend, not surprisingly, to know less about Orthodoxy than about Catholic and Protestant forms of Christianity. Yet careful interpretation of sermons, saints' lives, hymns, canon law, and histories, together with architecture, icons, church decoration, and small devotional objects enables a rich description of lay religion among non-elites. Drawing on the techniques of social and cultural history, the essays in this volume contribute to a historical anthropology of Byzantine Christianity.
Derek Krueger is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. A student of early Byzantine hagiography and monasticism, his publications include Symeon the Holy Fool: Leontius's Life and the Late Antique City (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996) and Writing and Holiness: The Practice of Authorship in the Early Christian East (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
| Shelving: | Religion / History of Christianity |
| Readers: |
General readers; college, university, seminary students; historians
0-8006-3413-6 $35.00 / Canada / UK 7" x 9", hardcover, 320 pp. |
| Rights: | World |
| June 2006 |
Contributors
Charles Barber is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Notre Dame. His research has focused on the aesthetics of the icon. His publications include The Theodore Psalter: An Electronic Facsimile (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000) and Figure and Likeness: On the Limits of Representation in Byzantine Iconoclasm (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).
Nicholas Constas is Associate Professor of Theology at Harvard Divinity School. His interests range from christological controversies and the patristic interpretation of scripture to the theological study of icons and iconography. He is the author of Proclus of Constantinople and the Cult of the Virgin in Late Antiquity (Leiden: Brill, 2003).
Georgia Frank is Associate Professor of Religion at Colgate University. The author of The Memory of the Eyes: Pilgrims to Living Saints in Christian Late Antiquity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), she has written articles on ancient Christian pilgrimage, liturgy, visual piety, and monasticism.
Sharon E. J. Gerstel is Associate Professor of Byzantine Art at the University of California, Los Angeles. A specialist in Byzantine art and archaeology with interests in the history of religion, Gerstel is author of Beholding the Sacred Mysteries: Programs of the Byzantine Sanctuary (Seattle: College Art Association and University of Washington Press, 1999). She has edited A Lost Art Rediscovered: Architectural Ceramics of Byzantium (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2001) and Thresholds of the Sacred: Architectural, Art Historical, Liturgical, and Theological Perspectives on Religious Screens, East and West (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2006).
Peter Hatlie is Academic Director and Visiting Associate Professor of the University of Dallas Rome Program. Specializing in early-Byzantine social and religious history, he has published articles about letter-writing, friendship, women, and various issues relating to monastic life. His forthcoming monograph on early-Byzantine monasticism, The Monks and Monasteries of Constantinople, will be published by Cambridge University Press.
Vasiliki Limberis is Associate Professor of Ancient Christianity at Temple University, Philadelphia. She is the author of Divine Heiress: The Virgin Mary and the Creation of Christian Constantinople (London: Routledge, 1994) and articles on the social and cultural history of the Christianity of the Cappadocian Fathers.
Jaclyn Maxwell is assistant professor in the Department of History and the Department of Classics and World Religions at Ohio University. Her research focuses on the interaction between different social classes in Late Antiquity. She is the author of Christianization and Communication: John Chrysostom and Lay Christians in Antioch (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
Brigitte Pitarakis is a researcher at the Centre d’Histoire et de Civilisation de Byzance, Collège de France - CNRS in Paris. Her main field is the study of Byzantine metalwork and its use in private and public contexts, both secular and ecclesiastical. Recent publications include Les croix-reliquaires pectorales byzantines en bronze (Paris: Picard, 2006) and A Treasured Memory: Ecclesiastical Siver from Late Ottoman Istanbul in the Sevgi Gönül Collection (Istanbul: Vehbi Koç Foundation, 2006).
James C. Skedros is Associate Professor of Early Christianity and Byzantine History at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology in Brookline, Massachusetts. He is the author of St. Demetrios of Thessaloniki: Civic Patron and Divine Protector (4th-7th c. CE) (Harrisburg, Penn.: Trinity Press International, 1999). He has written about popular religious practices in Late Antiquity, early Christian and Byzantine hagiography, pilgrimage, early Christian and Byzantine archaeology, and the Byzantine Church.
Alice-Mary Talbot, Director of Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, focuses her research on hagiography, monasticism, and the life of Byzantine women. She has served as Executive Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium and as director of two hagiography projects at Dumbarton Oaks. Among her publications are two collections of saints’ lives in translation, Holy Women of Byzantium (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1996) and Byzantine Defenders of Images (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1998), and Women and Religious Life in Byzantium (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001).
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