Transmitting and Circulating the Late Antique and Byzantine Worlds

Description

'Transmitting and Circulating the Late Antique and Byzantine Worlds' seeks to be a crucial contribution to the history of medieval connectedness. Using one of the methodological tools associated with the global history movement, this volume aims to use connectedness to revitalise local and regional networks of exchange and movement. Its case studies collectively point caution toward assuming or asserting global-scale transmission of meaning or items unchanged, and show instead how meaning is locally produced and regionally formulated, and how this is no less dynamic than any global-level connectedness. These case studies by early career scholars range from the movement of cotton growing practices to the transmission of information within individual texts. Their wide scope, however, is nonetheless united by their preoccupation with transmission and circulation as categories of analysing or explaining movement and change in history. This volume hopes to be, therefore, a useful contribution to the growing field of a history of connectivity and connectedness. Acknowledgments vii List of Maps and Illustrations viii Contributors x Introduction / Mirela Ivanova and Hugh Jeffery 1 Part 1. Movement of People 1. Evidence for Female Pilgrims at Abu Mina / Grace Stafford 11 2. Travelling Painters’ Workshops in the Late Antique Levant: Preliminary Observations / Julia Burdajewicz 44 3. A New Pilgrimage Site at Late Antique Ephesus. Transfer of Religious Ideas in Western Asia Minor / Katinka Sewing 78 4. 'Slavery' outside the Slave Trade. The Movement and Status of Captives between Byzantine Calabria and the Islamic World / Adele Curness 102 Part 2. Transmitting Traditions 5. 'This Shocking Lobster': Understanding the Fantastic Creatures of the Armenian Alexander Romance / Alex MacFarlane 125 6. Mauropous as Menander’s Student of Rhetoric. An Exile Progymnasma / Jovana Anđelković 149 7. Reappraising the Arabic Accounts for the Conflict of 446/1054–5. An Egyptian Perspective on Constantine IX and His Immediate Successors / Mathew Barber 170 8. The Apparition of Leo of Chalcedon. Anna Komnene’s Reproduction of a Lost Family Account of the Doukai / Peter Bara 199 Part 3. Contact 9. The Evidence of Byzantine Sgraffito Ware in 12th-Century Sicily. A Case Study into Economic and Socio-cultural Connections between the Norman Kingdom of Sicily and Komnenian Greece? / Matteo G. Randazzo 227 10. Between East Rome and Armenia: Paulician Ethnogenesis c. 780–850 / Carl Dixon 251 11. By Land or by Sea: Tracing the Adoption of Cotton in the Economies of the Mediterranean / Anna Kelley 274 Index 299