EMAIL BULLETIN
To have advance information about events organised by the Academy delivered directly to your inbox, please subscribe to our email bulletin
MISSED AN EVENT?
Some of our events are available as audio broadcasts, so you may be able to listen to the event you missed online (please allow a few days after the event for the audio files to be uploaded).
The Eastern Mediterranean in the Thirteenth century:
identities and allegiances
Building a prosopographical methodology
Convenors: Dame Averil Cameron, DBE, FBA, Professor Charlotte Roueché, King’s College London,
and Professor Judith Herrin, King’s College London
The British Academy, 10 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AH
Friday 30 March 2007-Saturday 31 March 2007
£30 (£20 concessions, postgraduate students may attend free of charge)
About this Event
The Byzantine identity was a complex one, based on political allegiance to an ill-defined Rome and a firm religious commitment to Orthodoxy, with an omnipresent Greek element, due to language, which was intensified among the Attic-educated intellectuals. Byzantium was quintessentially an empire with a strong sense of universality and eternity and a powerful centre in the New Rome of Constantinople. After 1204, however, many of these elements were removed or profoundly redefined, temporarily or for ever, as the heart of Byzantium was occupied by the Latin Empire. How can we define the Byzantine identity which remained and survived till 1261?
This colloquium planned by the Prosopography of the Byzantine World hopes to establish a pattern of relationships across the broader Byzantine world, a network of identities and allegiances that traces who was considered 'Byzantine' in the first half of the thirteenth century. This will help to generate a detailed set of clues to identify those in the East Mediterranean who claimed or attracted the term. Some of these clues will inevitably be more nuanced than others; but the context for studying individuals, institutions and states at a time when the death-throes of direct inheritance from Ancient Rome met the first colonialist stirrings of European nationalism and capital will be much enhanced.
The issues of transitional and fluid 'identities' are not unique to this period but simply far more obvious. In the past such fluidities have often been obscured by the format imposed by print publication, with its need to impose limits on any intellectual investigation. But as the Prosopography of the Byzantine World is dedicated to the electronic publication of an online database, the situation is different. While any one enterprise must still operate within limits, those limits can offer an interface with similar enterprises. We therefore intend to devote a final session to discussions about setting out the protocols for such interaction between projects, and we hope that this will produce guidelines of wider application.