Byzantine Studies
Fellows
Elizabeth S. Bolman (Temple University), “The Milk of Salvation? Constructions of the Nursing Virgin Mary in Eastern Christian Art”
Embodiment of paradoxes and prophecies, shaped by an array of metaphors, the heterogeneous, ever-shifting artifact that is the Virgin Mary could hardly stand further from the natural world. Late antique and Byzantine authors both fragmented her and invested her with immense authority. Despite her extraordinary qualities, remote from the experience of womankind, art historians who have attempted to interpret one aspect of this very complex subject—the nursing Virgin Mary—have commonly naturalized it. The vast distance that separates women engaging in the biologically natural act of nursing from the social construction of a nursing female cult figure disappears in these writings. This historiographic pattern interests me, and has motivated my desire to problematize this iconographic type, using it as a vehicle for exploring the variability of assemblages of the Virgin Mary Galaktotrophousa, or “she who nourishes with milk,” and her diverse audiences, in a book.
A minor but persistent eastern Mediterranean choice, depictions of the nursing Virgin first appear in significant numbers in late antique Egypt. These represent the reformulation of a pagan Egyptian nursing goddess type. In a move that seems counterintuitive to us, most of the Egyptian Christian exempla were designed for the male, monastic viewer, as wall paintings and manuscript illuminations. They read as a metaphor for the eucharist, emphasizing Christ’s divinity.
The next substantial cluster of images of the Galaktotrophousa belongs to Byzantium in the twelfth through fourteenth centuries. I have focused on these Byzantine images in my research at Dumbarton Oaks this year. I have confirmed that the Galaktotrophousa fits within a larger pattern of events that demonstrated the fullness of Christ’s human nature, and therefore represents the opposite of the Coptic construction of the same subject. I have added to the known exempla, and have studied their functional contexts and possible audiences.
In this book, I chart not the development of the nursing type, but the fluidity of its varied historical constructions and reconstructions, in Greco-Roman and Coptic Egypt, and Byzantium. My central point is to demonstrate the break between nature, on the one hand, and the social construction of ideas about and images of nursing, on the other.
Daniel F. Caner (University of Connecticut), “Wealth, Charity, and Christian Imagination in the Early Byzantine Period”
My research in Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks this year explored the idea of sacred wealth and its proper management from the fifth through the eighth centuries. This was the first period in history in which Christian institutions became economically prominent as centers of donation and distribution, raising basic questions about how such wealth was represented and justified. To address these questions I focused on the use of the word “blessing” (eulogia in Greek, benedictio in Latin, bûrktâ in Syriac, smou in Coptic) as a special designation for a Christian gift in church and monastic literature of the time. Commonly applied to liturgical offerings, lay donations, medicaments, or tokens of hospitality or affection given out by clerics, monks, or at holy land shrines, the word also appears in hagiography as a gift sent by God to support people who do charitable work. It therefore provides a key to understanding how religious wealth was idealized and, to some degree, managed in early Byzantium.
What my research demonstrates is that the Christian notion of a “blessing” mainly derived from Paul’s definition of a “blessing” in Second Corinthians 9:5–12, but gained definition and importance in the Roman East through contrast with more worldly gifts of the time. Considered a product of God’s bounty, items called “blessings” were given out to churchmen and monks as a supplemental ration, thereby providing a material basis for charitable giving. When given, such gifts were also supposed to be free of self-interest, making no demands on either giver or receiver (for example, monks who gave them are presented as asking for nothing in return). When viewed against the secular use of gifts to achieve promotions or impose patronal bonds, it is this aspect of a Christian “blessing” that made it especially novel, providing one of the earliest historical examples of a “pure” gift. It was also conceptually different from an alms, since it was not given in atonement, and was believed to derive from God’s grace. Hence it provided the conceptual basis for a distinctly Christian way of thinking about material wealth and its use in early Byzantium.
Dumbarton Oaks greatly facilitated this work by providing access to rare editions, lexica, and papyri, and by providing training on use of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. Both enabled me to survey my subject in a manner more comprehensive than has been done before or would have been otherwise possible.
Andrew Crislip (University of Hawaii at Manoa, Fall), “Christian Monasticism and the Transformation of Health Care in Late Antiquity”
My research for the fall term of 2004–2005 brings to light the healing traditions of Late Antiquity and the nascent monastic movement’s role in shaping health care in Egypt and throughout the greater Byzantine world. The intent of the project was to use the resources at Dumbarton Oaks to expand the work begun in my 2002 Yale dissertation, “Christian Monasticism and the Development of the Hospital in Late Antiquity.” While my previous work has focused on monastic health care in its social context in Late Antiquity, my current work focuses on both the intellectual transmission of healing traditions in early Byzantine monasticism and on placing the healing traditions of monasticism within the context of those in cognate institutions, such as saints’ shrines.
First, I should note that during the fellowship I was able to bring to an end the editing of my book based on my dissertation research, From Monastery to Hospital, forthcoming in 2005. More significantly for my use of the resources at Dumbarton Oaks, I began a second monograph that expands areas of my research into monastic medicine. One part of this undertaking has been an edition and translation of the corpus of Coptic medical literature—a little known Byzantine tradition that draws on both Greek and Egyptian medical traditions. Another is research in the various institutions through which healing was provided in late antiquity, including not only the monasteries, but also the burgeoning saints’ shrines, physicians in private practice, and of course the hospital, the great medical innovation of the early Byzantine period. The resources of Dumbarton Oaks have been central to my project, bringing together holdings in such disparate fields as papyrology, hagiography, and Byzantine medicine. During my tenure at Dumbarton Oaks, I have finished an annotated translation of Coptic medical literature from Byzantine Egypt and have written and submitted for publication several articles on the healing traditions of early Byzantine monasticism. These include an edition of an Egyptian monastic letter requesting pharmacological ingredients for a sick monastic; an edition of a Byzantine Greek papyrus preserving recipes for medicinal wines; and a study reevaluating monastic approaches to one of the most famous and trenchant psychological disorders of early Byzantine monasticism, acedia, commonly equated with depression.
Ivan Jordanov (Archaeological Institute, Bulgarian Academy of Science), “The Prosopography of Bulgaria under Byzantine Rule, 971–1185”
My scholarly research has followed two basic lines of investigation:
1. Searching in the narrative sources (chronicles, annals, acts, documents, vitae, etc.) to ascertain information on the following people:
- Byzantine governors (secular, military, and ecclesiastical) of the Bulgarian lands for the period 971–1185.
- Individuals connected with the Bulgarian lands: Bulgarians by origin, short- or long- term residents in the Bulgarian lands, and generally persons with material and other interests in the Bulgarian lands.
The materials under this rubric available at Dumbarton Oaks have proved extremely numerous and the time allotted for their detailed examination and bringing this process to completion has proved insufficient. All those materials have been documented by photocopying or scanning. Work on them will continue after my return to Bulgaria with the intention to involve other specialists in this field.
2. Investigation in the fields of sigillography, archaeology, and epigraphy with the purpose of documenting the following:
- Seals of Byzantine governors (secular, military and ecclesiastical) of the Bulgarian lands.
- Seals of individuals connected with the Bulgarian lands, Bulgarians by origin; short- or long-term residents in the Bulgarian lands, individuals who wrote letters to Bulgaria and whose seals have been found in situ in the Bulgarian lands.
- Individuals attested on monuments of art, archaeological materials, inscriptions, etc., connected with the Bulgarian lands in the discussed period.
I focused my efforts on this line of investigation, since the Dumbarton Oaks resources in these areas are enormous and this work can only be carried out in person. From the very large collection of seals at Dumbarton Oaks (approximately 17,000 specimens), I have located seals of individuals connected with the Bulgarian lands in the period 971–1185, namely: by office: Byzantine governors (secular, military, and ecclesiastical) of the Bulgarian lands for the period 971–1185; by origin: bearing proper or family names indicating a Bulgarian origin; parallels of the more than 3,000 Byzantine seals discovered in the Bulgarian lands; and generally seals of individuals of the same families somehow connected with Bulgaria, since the theme of the project is basically prosopographic.
This process took more than five months working with the card-indexes and the originals. After January 2005, I began entering the information from the examined seals and narrative sources into the manuscript of the Corpus of the Byzantine Seals from Bulgaria, Volume 2: Seals with Family Names.
The working process was slow but extremely useful. The whole manuscript, whose English text is going to be revised soon, amounts to approximately 500 computer pages. It includes nearly 800 Byzantine seals, a large number of which are unpublished to date, and contains a prosopographic survey of more than 2,000 individuals who played an important role in the Bulgarian lands and generally in Byzantine society in the tenth–twelfth centuries. I hope the Corpus of the Byzantine Seals from Bulgaria, Volume 2: Seals with Family Names will be published before the congress in Byzantine Studies in London in 2006.
Of course, with this the work on my project and generally my scholarly research have not been completed. I have also examined and documented materials, sphragistic and narrative, that will be included in the next volume, Corpus of the Byzantine Seals from Bulgaria, Volume 3: Seals of Byzantine Institutions (Secular and Ecclesiastical) from the Capital Constantinople.
Claudia Rapp (University of California, Los Angeles, Spring), “A Historical and Literary Commentary on the Vita of Epiphanius of Salamis”
These months at Dumbarton Oaks have enabled me to complete the research for several chapters of my commentary on Life of Epiphanius of Cyprus, the great church father and heresiologist of the late fourth century. The Vita itself must have been composed between 439 and 478.
In order to make the most of the DO’s rich library resources in history, archaeology, and art history, I have concentrated on three locations of Epiphanius’s life: Palestine, Persia, and Cyprus.
According to his Vita, Epiphanius was born into a poor Jewish family near Eleutheropolis. He eventually converted to Christianity, became a monk, and later established his own monastic community at “Spanhydrion.” I have found that the Vita is quite accurate in describing the general surroundings in late Antique Judaea. Excavations at Beth Guvrin (Eleutheropolis) show a prosperous city and confirm the presence of Jews and Christians in the area.
Shortly after he became a hermit, Epiphanius traveled to Persia in order to heal the king’s daughter of a demon. Comparison with descriptions of Persian court ritual and the reception of foreigners and guests at the court again confirms the accuracy of detail in the hagiographer’s account. The narrative of this episode is closely modeled on a similar account of miraculous healing performed by the pagan philosopher Eustathius recorded in Eunapius’s Lives of the Sophists.
Epiphanius spent the last decades of his life as bishop of Constantia (just north of modern Famagusta) in Cyprus. Again, the archaeological record contains nothing to contradict the Vita. The presence of lavishly appointed private villas in Constantia as well as Paphos and Kourion attests to the enduring power of the local aristocrats whom, according to the Vita, the new bishop struggled to convert to Christianity. The five-aisled basilica he is reported to have built is still standing, complete with several spaces for specially honored tombs in the south aisle. Its close proximity to a massive temple of Zeus must have inspired the hagiographer to assert that Epiphanius miraculously found a large amount of gold in this temple with which to finance his building project.
A further valuable resource at DO has been the ease of access to digital resources, especially the online Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. This has enabled me to identify that the hagiographer puts three words from Homer’s Iliad I 225, “kynos ommat’ echon,” in Epiphanius’s mouth as the saint chastises a recalcitrant deacon as “having the eyes of a dog.” The hagiographer also refers to Dionysius of Halikarnassos and Hesiod—thus demonstrating his erudition.
The combination of accurate detail with the use of classical allusions and pagan sources are unusual for a hagiographical work of this period and attest to the historical interest and literary value of the Life of Epiphanius.
Alexander L. Saminski (Andrei Rublev Museum of Early Russian Art, Moscow), “Antioch (969–1268): Byzantine Provincial Art from Georgia and Greek Illuminated Manuscripts”
In 969, Byzantium reconquered Antioch after three centuries of Arab occupation. In 1268, it was captured and devastated by the Mamluks. There are reasons to believe that during these three centuries of renewed Byzantine rule the city may have become an important cultural center of the empire, as it had been before the Arab invasion. Our only source for evaluating Antiochene art is a few Georgian and Greek illuminated manuscripts. Georgia had been a part of the Patriarchate of Antioch since the fourth century. A multitude of Georgians lived in Antioch after the Byzantine victory side by side with the Greek population. Therefore Georgian manuscripts of attested Antiochene origin enable us to recognize their anonymous Greek relatives.
What, then, do these books tell us about the city’s cultural activity? First of all, statistical analysis reveals that the rise of the illuminated book in Antioch was very short-lived: for a period of 20 years after the middle of the eleventh century. Only then could Antioch proclaim herself as an artistic center of the Byzantine world. On the other hand, a fine miniature from a Gospel Lectionary in the Bibliothèque orientale in Beirut, painted between 1323 and 1344, testifies that occasional production of illuminated books persisted in the Antiochene Patriarchate even long after the devastation of the city.
Two exquisite manuscripts from 1054 with miniatures indistinguishable from those of Constantinople suggest that Hellenism flourished in Antioch once more as the culture of the upper classes, in this sense continuing a tradition interrupted by the Arab conquest. Other books exemplify a variety of styles corresponding to the aesthetics of different strata of Antiochene society; nevertheless, all of them were strongly influenced by the art of Constantinople. Instead of the expected stylistic consistency that would add one more local center to the general picture of Byzantine art, the manuscripts reveal the richness and diversity of Antochene culture, suggesting new and unknown aspects still to be discovered.
A hallmark of Antiochene book production seems to be the extraordinary miscellaneous character shared by all the manuscripts. This enables us to ascribe to Antioch a manuscript at the Walters in Baltimore (W 532), the Greek Gospel illuminated by Armenian Chalcedonian artists, and another one in the Great Lavra on Mt. Athos painted by a Melchite master, who was unfamiliar with the Greek language.
Rustam M. Shukurov (Lomonosov Moscow State University), “Latent Turkification of Byzantium (ca. 1071–1461)”
The present research project is intended to analyze interethnic (Greek and Turkic), intercultural, and interconfessional (Christian and Muslim) relationships and influences during the Turkic conquests of Asia Minor and the Balkans. The project represents an attempt to reconstruct the actual content and evolution of the ethno-cultural interaction between Byzantine societies in Anatolia and the Balkans, and the Turkic element (the Cumans, Turkmens, Saljuqs, and Ottomans). The focus of my research is Byzantine mentality viewed from the standpoint of its reaction to its meeting with the Alien.
Several interconnected aspects of the problem posed have been studied during the academic year 2004–2005: (1) Ethnic presence of Turks in different strata of Byzantine population; (2) Oriental influences upon the medieval Greek spoken and literary languages of the Balkans and Anatolia; (3) The Byzantine view of the Turks, Muslims and the Orient; (4) Oriental influences upon Byzantine material culture.
The concrete outcomes of the study of the aforementioned aspects are as follows: (1) The Database of the Turks in Byzantium from the end of the eleventh through the fifteenth century has been composed; part one, the Turks under the Komnenoi and the Lascarids (almost completed); part two, the Turks in the empires of the Palaiologoi and the Grand Komnenoi (ready for publication); (2) The Database of Oriental lexical elements in twelfth–fifteenth-century medieval Greek (almost completed); (3) Materials from primary and secondary sources for a series of special studies dealing with the general topic “Turks, Muslims and the Orient in Byzantine everyday mentality” have been gathered and systematized.
The results of this research will soon be submitted as a monograph. The research described above should give an up-to-date and most complete picture of the reaction of Byzantine civilization to its meeting with the Turks, and should contribute to a better understanding of the causes and mechanism of success and failure in the contest between civilizations.
Junior Fellows
Emmanuel C. Bourbouhakis (Harvard University), “Eustathios of Thessalonike: A Literary Profile Based on a New Edition, Translation, and Commentary of Five Opuscula”
My anticipated goal during my junior fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks was to revise parts of my dissertation drafted while at the Byzantinisch-Neugriechisches Institut in Berlin last year, and to finish the remaining sections of the work in time for Spring 2005 graduation at Harvard University. This project has been multifaceted from the start, involving textual criticism, translation of a text replete with involved rhetorical idiom, and a joint philological-historical commentary designed to render the text accessible to advanced students of Byzantine literature and language, as well as informative for scholars wishing to exploit one part of the rich cultural and literary legacy bequeathed by the remarkable figure of Eustathius of Thessalonike. As such, work on the dissertation advanced on many fronts simultaneously, with each part shedding light on otherwise obscure and inscrutable material in other parts. Since I expect to submit the work for publication next year, it has been important all along to aim at thoroughness and fastidious handling of textual questions in order to have a camera-ready copy soon after submission for graduation.
While my area of research, strictly speaking, is philology and palaeography, the nature of this project required the unrivaled resources of Dumbarton Oaks in Byzantine history, rare nineteenth-century monographs, recent publications on Constantinopolitan monastic foundations, and even some coins. Textual criticism and interpretation may call on any number of sources for help and guidance. The composite nature of the work, drawing on research as diverse as theological scholarship and literary theory, reflects the persistently composite or interdisciplinary nature of Byzantine studies.
At least one interesting outcome of the research I have conducted while here has been a renewed appreciation at what remains to be done in the still nascent field of the study of Byzantine literature. The text I am editing, long considered unimaginative and ridden with clichés and commonplaces, has revealed itself upon closer scrutiny to be an outstanding example of twelfth-century literary culture, with all its foibles, no doubt, but also possessed of an aesthetic of oral-aural poetics so far little mentioned and even less well understood. This work should help bring the study of Byzantine literature closer to the fold of literary studies more broadly and the humanities, where its unique perspective of language and the ties between art, spirit, and society is likely to be appreciated as distinctly instructive.
Niels Henrik Gaul (Bonn University), “Authorship, Audience, and Performance of Highbrow Literature in Late Byzantium (ca. 1250–ca. 1350)”
My research project addressed the question of “Authorship, Audience, and Performance of Highbrow Literature in Late Byzantium (ca. 1250–ca. 1350).” In the fashion of a cultural poetic (“new historicist”) analysis, I was particularly interested in reading the abundant rhetorical production of the early Palaiologan period as a means of representing (reenforcing), distributing, and challenging (imperial) power and social influence within the upper strata of Byzantine society.
To this end, I scrutinized a widespread social practice in late Byzantium, the so-called theatron. While the term originally denoted a classical—and, for that matter, modern—“theater,” in Byzantium it came to describe a circle of learned men, very rarely women, who read (performed) their rhetorical compositions to one another. Hitherto, theatra were perceived as “circles of the Muses,” as “classless,” “unofficial,” and “informal.” A close reading of the sources, however, made it obvious that the theatron was quite the opposite: In fact, a hierarchy of theatra began to emerge. At the top ranked the imperial theatron, followed by the still “exclusive” theatra in the houses of the imperial family and the emperor’s ministers, spreading down through society to the houses of schoolmasters (hence, I believe, the renewed composition of meletai, rhetorical set pieces in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries) and “common” litterati.
Rhetoric composed in the Attic Greek dialect—commonly believed to have been “escapist” and “phantastic,” as to have been “removed at least one stage from reality”—thus became visible as a form of “social energy” (Greenblatt), that circulated in the theatra: the more social energy an author managed to invest in a text, the more prestige (“cultural capital”) he would gain and the higher he would climb on the social ladder. It goes without saying that the opposite could be equally true: If he failed, his career would not progress very far—or even come to an end.
This analysis of the late Byzantine theatron is included as a methodological/background chapter in my PhD dissertation, which exemplifies the interaction of the late Byzantine learned élite and wider society by focusing on the late Byzantine scholar Thomas Magistros (ca. 1280–ca. 1347/8). My project profited immensely from the online and excellent library resources at Dumbarton Oaks, especially the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae and ready access to even the most remote editions allowed the exhaustive search for the term theatron in Byzantine textual sources from the mid-thirteenth to the late fourteenth century.
Günder Varinlioğlu (University of Pennsylvania), “The Rural Landscape and Built Environment at the End of Antiquity: Limestone Villages of Southeastern Isauria”
During the academic year of 2004–2005, I worked on my dissertation entitled “The Rural Landscape and Built Environment at the End of Antiquity: The Limestone Villages of Southeastern Isauria.” In my dissertation, I investigate the character of rural settlement patterns, land use, and building practices in a marginal territory located in the hinterland of Seleucia on the Calycadnus river (modern-day Silifke in southern Turkey), the capital of the late Roman province of Isauria. I explore the transformations that the countryside underwent during the transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, due to the Persian and Arab invasions, the disruption and transformation of trade networks in the Mediterranean, and the plagues and earthquakes which struck urban centers from the sixth century onwards. In my study and interpretation of this period, which spans the period of the fourth century to the end of the first millennium, I use several types of evidence: ancient texts, accounts of travelers, epigraphy, and the archaeological data I gathered during two summers of fieldwork in the rural landscapes of Isauria. I focus on this particular territory in southeastern Isauria with a much larger goal of understanding regional dynamics which allowed the formation and viability of a dense network of settlements and intraregional communications in the late antique Mediterranean world.
At Dumbarton Oaks, I focused on two aspects of my dissertation. First, I studied the accounts of travelers from antiquity to the twentieth century using the virtually complete collection of ancient, medieval, and modern authors at the Dumbarton Oaks Library. Second, I worked on the new data I collected in the summers of 2003 and 2004, namely the architectural sculpture, masonry techniques, pottery, and settlements. I studied these in comparison to similar evidence from the larger region as well as from the eastern Mediterranean. In this part of my research, I made intensive use of the articles, books, dissertations, etc., dealing with similar material evidence from late antique and Byzantine Anatolia, the Levant, Egypt, North Africa, and Greece. The academic year I spent at Dumbarton Oaks allowed me to contextualize my research in the wider field of Byzantine settlement and landscape archaeology. In other words, I investigated the significance of southeastern Isauria within broader settlement patterns and networks in the eastern Mediterranean through the comparison of the material evidence from diverse sites and landscapes. My research attempted to answer to the need for new data and approaches in order to draw a more complete picture of Anatolian rural landscapes during the transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages.
Summer Fellows
Marcello Garzaniti (University of Florence), “From Holy Land to Holy Russia: The Origins of the Pilgrimage Literature of the Rus’”
After analyzing various witnesses of pilgrimage literature from Rus’ and Muscovy, and reviewing previous research whose results are already published or in print, I propose to write a monograph on the pilgrimage and journey tale in medieval Rus’ and Muscovy. Prior to the final draft of the book, my sojourn at Dumbarton Oaks has given me the possibility to use the rich library and especially to study the relations between Greek proskynetaria, Latin pilgrimage literature of the Crusader period, and East Slavic pilgrimage tales.
Today one hears repeated, uncritically, the notion that East Slavic pilgrimage tales depend on Byzantine literature. The influence of pilgrimage literature of the Latin world in the period of the Crusades was also not excluded. On this question see K. D. Seemann, Die altrussische Wallfahrtsliteratur. Theorie und Geschichte eines literarischen Genres (Munich, 1976) and A. Külzer, Peregrinatio graeca in Terram Sanctam. Studien zu Pilgerführern und Reisebeschreibungen über Syrien, Palästina und den Sinai aus byzantinischer und metabyzantinischer Zeit (Vienna, 1994). After comparing Greek and Latin pilgrimage literature with the Pilgrimage to the Holy Land of Hegumen Daniil (Itinerario in Terra santa, trans. M. Garzaniti) (Rome, 1991), I did not find any direct textual dependence of the Slavic tale upon Greek and Latin pilgrimage tales. But this does not mean that the Pilgrimage of Daniil represents an original model. The first Slavic pilgrimage tale has in common with the Greek proskynetaria the Sitz im Leben, the liturgical and monastic tradition of the Byzantine world: the Palestinian guide of Hegumen Daniil, a monk of Mar Saba, played an important role in the creation of Daniil's work. From the other side, however, together with Latin pilgrimage literature, Daniil's Pilgrimage reflects the same social phenomenon of European pilgrimage. The Rus’ shows a more open approach to the historical reality of the Latin Kingdom in comparison with the Byzantine world.
Stefan Heidemann, “Preparation of a Catalogue of the Christian Oriental Seals in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection”
The borderlands between Byzantium and the Islamic Empire, namely Syria, northern Mesopotamia, and Armenia, fostered diverse religions, languages, and cultures. Their mutual interaction is not well understood. Literary sources of one language tend to exclude others, and new primary documents are needed. Lead seals in Syriac, Arabic, and Armenian languages, but in Byzantine style, emerged as a result of political, ecclesiastical, and cultural expansion of the Byzantine Empire into Syria, northern Mesopotamia, and Armenia in the tenth–twelfth centuries. As documents, they contribute to prosopography, art history, philology, and even political and economic history. They provide information about political and cultural life at the fringes of the empire, which is relatively scarce in Byzantine sources. Islamic studies focus on the political and economic renaissance of the cities during the late twelfth–thirteenth century in Syria and northern Mesopotamia. We have almost no primary documents, only a rich, self-referential historical literature, written after events. But half of the population was still Christian, Jewish, or even pagan.
Dumbarton Oaks holds the largest collection of these seals, with about 100 specimens. The publication of these documents requires expertise in two different disciplines: Byzantine (C. Sode) as well as in Islamic and Syriac studies (S. Heidemann). Besides extracting new information about formulas, abbreviations, stylistic groups, etc., we have made some quite unexpected discoveries. A Syriac seal, depicting an intricate image of St. Nicholas, introduces the owner Yosef bar ‘Isa as money changer (katallaktis) in Greek script. For the first time, someone outside the political and ecclesiastical hierarchy is found on Oriental seals with the indication of his profession. This may well reflect that during the eleventh century huge numbers of Byzantine gold and copper coins were traded as a commodity into the Islamic Empire, in order to circulate there for a further hundred years.
We note that one seal belonged to the amir al-Hasan ibn Ghafras (Gabras), a descendant of Byzantine nobility, who usurped the Seljuq throne in 1192. This latter fact is documented only by this unique seal. Thus, it can be seen that, like coins, the seals provide hitherto untapped contemporary information. The last monograph on the subject, a booklet in Ottoman Turkish, was published in 1904.
Every day we made new, exciting discoveries. The library was very helpful for immediately following up on new ideas. Certain iconographic types could be checked on the spot with the numismatic collection and visually explored with the photographic resources.
Asen Kirin (University of Georgia), “Sacred Art, Secular Context: Exhibition at the Georgia Museum of Art from the Byzantine Collection of Dumbarton Oaks”
My summer fellowship was devoted to the cataloguing of objects from the Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Collection in preparation for the exhibit Sacred Art, Secular Context for the Georgia Museum of Art, May 14–November 6, 2005. With objects dating from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries, the exhibition will include carved gems, jewels, golden coins, steelyards with weights, silverware, and sculptural reliefs. Approximately half of the pieces are miniature in scale and are exquisitely crafted in gold, cloisonné enamel, and precious or semi-precious stones. All objects feature sacred images and/or inscriptions, even though they functioned in the secular context of personal adornment, dining, and dealings at the marketplace. In addition to the sphere of everyday life in Byzantium, the “secular context” alludes also to the environment within which Mr. and Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss collected art in the early twentieth century. An accompanying exhibition will display ten works of modern American painting acquired at the same time as many of the Byzantine objects. Thus the overall display presents the phenomenon of collecting and studying works of Byzantine art as a lesser-known chapter in the history of American visual culture. As collectors, the Blisses followed the advanced discussions of art historians about the sources and main currents in the history of Western art. Mr. and Mrs. Bliss shared the view that Byzantium preserved the Hellenistic and Roman intellectual and artistic traditions and conveyed them to late medieval and early Renaissance Italy.
One of the catalogue articles I completed involves an enigmatic carved gem—a rock crystal intaglio heretofore described as a sixth-century piece representing the Denial of Apostle Peter. My research demonstrated that this is a Roman object dating to the first century BCE and that it depicts a scene from Aeschylus's tragedy The Seven Against Thebes.M. C. Ross, Catalogue of the Byzantine and Early Medieval Antiquities in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection. Volume One: Metalwork, Ceramics, Glass, Glyptics, Painting (Washington, D.C., 1962), 94–95, no. 113, plate LⅧ. G. Kornbluth has already suggested that this is the true subject matter of the gem, cf. “'Early Byzantine' Crystals: An Assessment,” The Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 53/53 (1994/95): 23–30, esp. 24, 29, No. 10. Nevertheless, in her article Kornbluth does not discuss the gem's iconography and meaning, so this catalogue entry will do just this for the very first time. As rendered, the composition on the gem focuses on Amphiaraus—a legendary hero worshiped as a god in an oracular shrine dedicated to him. Therefore the gems on which this scene appears might have functioned as talismans for those in the military. On the whole, the popularity of this topic during the last century BCE in Italy may have been a reflection of the high regard for Attic drama in Magna Graecia, the place of perpetual theater revivals. Also, it is possible that the stories about the fratricidal wars of the Greeks, as told by Aeschylus, acquired new relevance at that time when Romans were fighting against Romans in the civil wars that led to the establishment of the empire.
Sergio La Porta (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), “The Early Armenian Scholia on the Works Attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite”
The corpus of works attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite was translated from Greek into Armenian by Step'anos Siwnec'i at the beginning of the eighth century. Subsequently, scholia on the corpus were composed in Armenian. I am currently preparing an edition and translation of the scholia attributed to Hamam Arewelc'i (ninth century) and the scholia attributed to Dawit' Kobayrec'i (d. ca. 1220) and a certain Yakob. My research has shown that none of these authors could have composed the scholia, since they must be dated to the second half of the thirteenth century. Furthermore, the sets of scholia attributed to Hamam and to Dawit' and Yakob share a complete set of scholia (Set A), while some manuscripts also preserve a second, possibly contemporaneous, set of scholia (Set B). In total there are approximately 1500 scholia, of which approximately 1200 or four-fifths may be assigned to Set A.
I have also been able to suggest the monastic communities around Mt. Sepuh in Erznka (Erzincan) as the center of either production or compilation of these scholia. The corpus of works attributed to Dionysius played an important role in the medieval Armenian monastic schools. The language of the scholia witnesses many Middle Armenian forms and words and may reflect the recording of oral classroom instruction. One may also detect loan words from Arabic or Persian. In addition to shedding light on how the Dionysian texts were read in the monasteries, the scholia highlight some of the pressing issues of the day especially concerning monastic and liturgical practice. The scholia display knowledge of Latin and Greek liturgical and monastic traditions and encourage tolerance for differing practices. The author may have tried to ease tensions between the Latin-influenced or informed Armenian clergy of the Kingdom of Cilicia and the more conservative Armenian clergy of Greater Armenia.
While at Dumbarton Oaks, I was able to complete a translation of all the scholia and assess the authorship, dating, and provenance of the scholia. I was further able to examine secondary literature on the Dionysian Corpus itself as well as on its role and reception in other Christian communities.
Tassos C. Papacostas (King’s College London), “The History and Architecture of the Monastery of St. John Chrysostom at Koutsovendis, Cyprus”
Part of Dumbarton Oaks’ fieldwork in Cyprus during the 1960s was focused on the late eleventh-century Greek Orthodox monastery of St. John Chrysostom at Koutsovendis. At that time, its surviving church of the Holy Trinity was being restored and its frescoes were cleaned and conserved. A preliminary report and a description of the wall-paintings were published (DOP 18 and 44). According to the plan envisaged by Cyril Mango, who initiated the study of this monument, these articles should be complemented by a publication comprising the following chapters:
- History
- The founder George and the liturgical typikon
- The patron Eumathios Philokales
- Neophytos the Recluse and the Maronite community
- Later history of the monastery (later medieval and modern periods)
- Architecture and Sculpture (of the monastic churches)
- Iconography (of the surviving frescoes)
- Style and Ornament (of the surviving frescoes)
It was agreed that Maria Parani would take charge of the chapters on the frescoes, while I would prepare a major article on the history and architecture/sculpture for publication in DOP.
During the first weeks of my stay here I concentrated on the longest and most complex part of the work, namely sections 1.1 and 1.2. These have now become rather extensive, mainly on account of fresh evidence discovered here. I should stress that the library holdings and the seals collection have been crucial to this work. The latter in particular has provided some important unpublished specimens belonging to the monastery’s patron and his family which supplement the information gleaned from the narrative sources. Specialists and colleagues in other fields have also been very helpful with other aspects of my research, and Michael Grünbart has agreed to edit as an appendix to the publication a letter of Nikon of the Black Mountain to the founder George. This is one of the key sources for the early history of the monastery.
In April 2004, I visited a group of related churches in Cyprus itself. Monuments in other parts of the Byzantine Empire are even more important though for comparative purposes, since the architectural type of the main church (a domed octagon) was introduced here at Koutsovendis for the first time on the island, and its appearance requires some explanation.
Research on the architecture of the monastery’s two churches (the Holy Trinity and the main church, demolished in 1891 and known mainly from descriptions, sketches, and an architectural plan) has been facilitated greatly by the Dumbarton Oaks photographic resources, since the site of Koutsovendis, currently within a military zone, has been inaccessible to scholars since 1974. The photographic archive has also been immensely useful for tracing comparative material.
Maria G. Parani (Nicosia, Cyprus), “The Monastery of St. Chrysostomos at Koutsovendis (Cyprus): The Wall-Paintings”
The monastery of St. John Chrysostom at Koutsovendis in Cyprus was founded in the late eleventh century by the monk George, who probably hailed from Syria-Palestine. A few years later, a chapel dedicated to the Holy Trinity was constructed contiguous to the katholikon and adorned with magnificent wall-paintings (ca. 1100), which are now only partially preserved. The founder of the chapel and donor of its painted decoration was the governor of Cyprus Eumathios Philokales. The surviving wall-paintings of the Trinity chapel were conserved and recorded by a team from Dumbarton Oaks under Cyril Mango in the 1960s. Following the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, the monastery of St. Chrysostom, located in a Turkish military zone, became inaccessible and the wall-paintings were covered up by whitewash and large sheets of paper. Because of these unfortunate circumstances, the numerous black-and-white prints and, especially, the detailed color slides and transparencies in the Dumbarton Oaks Photograph Archive have come to constitute an invaluable source for the study of this important painted ensemble.
My study of the paintings of Holy Trinity constitutes part of a larger project undertaken in collaboration with Cyril Mango and Tassos Papacostas, with the aim of publishing a comprehensive study on Koutsovendis that will contain sections dedicated to the history of the monastery, its architecture, sculpture, and the chapel frescoes. The presence of Dr. Papacostas at Dumbarton Oaks, also as a Summer Fellow, provided me with an excellent opportunity to exchange ideas with him and profit greatly from his expertise.
The iconographic study of the frescoes deals mainly with certain features that appear unusual. Some of these could probably be considered as reflecting current theological discussions and recent developments in the art of the period, while others are perhaps better associated with the donor and his motives, the chapel’s function, its specific monastic milieu, or the influence of local historical conditions and artistic traditions. The stylistic study of the frescoes addresses primarily the problem of the artistic tradition to which they belong. Considering the links of the Koutsovendis monastic community with Syria-Palestine, the possibility that the Koutsovendis master came from the area of Antioch is being explored. Having access to the excellent reference library of Dumbarton Oaks was essential in pursuing further this line of comparative art-historical inquiry. The section on style also explores the relation of Koutsovendis to other Cypriot painted ensembles of the early twelfth century, with special emphasis on the paintings of Asinou, Trikomo, and Apsinthiotissa. As a consequence of 1974, the unpublished paintings of the latter church are now destroyed. The color slides from Apsinthiotissa in the Dumbarton Oaks Photograph Archive constitute a rare record of this little-known lost masterpiece.
Emilie van Opstall (University of Amsterdam), “John Geometres: An Edition, Translation, and Commentary of his Poems in Hexameters and Elegiacs”
Soldier and poet in the second half of tenth-century Constantinople, John Geometres writes in the tradition of the Macedonian Renaissance, which found its inspiration in Antiquity, but also shows signs of a new era in which Hellenistic form and Christian ideas merge. In 1841, J. A. Cramer published Geometres’ poems for the first time.J. A. Cramer, Appendix ad excerpta poetica: codex 352 suppl., Anecdota Graeca e Codd. Manuscriptis Bibliothecae regiae Parisiensis, vol. 4 (Oxford, 1841, repr. Hildesheim, 1967), 265–352. His edition is based on a single manuscript (the thirteenth-century Paris. suppl. gr. 352) and contains an amazing number of inaccuracies. Nonetheless, subsequent editors of Geometres’ poems have used this edition without consulting the manuscripts themselves. The poems certainly deserve a better fate, for Geometres is a key figure in the history of Byzantine poetry, as has been observed time and again. I am preparing a new edition of his poems composed in hexameter and elegiacs with a French translation and commentary. This will enable not only scholars of Byzantine literature, but of Byzantine history and art as well, to arrive at a better formed judgement of Geometres and the cultural history of his time.
The summer at Dumbarton Oaks provided a unique opportunity to write the commentary on a series of poems in relation to their (art) historical context. Not only the extremely rich library, which provides easy access to art historical studies (sometimes not found elsewhere), but also the advice of the scholars present was very helpful, especially in the field of iconography.
Garden and Landscape Studies
Fellows
Kendall Brown (California State University, Long Beach),
“Rhetorical Landscapes: A Social History of Japanese-Style Gardens in North America”
Japanese gardens have attained an iconic status in world garden history and in popular culture. Yet, despite their fame and the plethora of publications on them, we still know little about why they were made, how they were utilized, and what they meant for their designers and patrons. Among gardens built in Japanese styles in North America—a group of roughly 350 extant public gardens and perhaps an equal number of historic ones—the problem is even more pronounced. The few popular books on the subject (and pamphlets on individual gardens) place these landscapes under the rubric of Japanese gardens
and treat them as a subset of pre-modern gardens in Japan, analyzing them superficially in terms of design typology and general spirituality. As such these gardens are largely divorced from the realms of their own creation and function.
My project conceives of Japanese gardens in America as forming a domain in their own right—a change in status indicated by the term Japanese-style gardens. These gardens belong to American landscape history and, as a kind of hybrid, they challenge easy assumptions about the status of national garden types beyond national borders. Japanese-style gardens can be productively interpreted within the discourse of Orientalism because many are literal and symbolic constructions of Japan by Americans. They connect, for instance, to the collecting of exotic foreign objects among status-conscious elites, to the deployment of ethnic stereotypes at commercial ventures, to the display of cultural diversity by educational institutions, to the fostering of political and economic relationships by governments, and to the longing for tranquility by harried middle-class homeowners. Yet, because many of the earliest and largest gardens were built by the Japanese government at international expositions (and later as sister-city projects), Japanese-style gardens also demonstrate how Japanese presented themselves abroad in ways that suggest a strategic self-Orientalism.
My work at Dumbarton Oaks took two forms. One avenue was research into the facticity of Japanese-style gardens utilizing the collection of books and journals on gardens in America (as well as those of the Library of Congress and at the Smithsonian). The other was reading recent theoretical works on gardens, landscapes, and ethnographic display. The results were the detection of more than a dozen important new historical gardens and, more critically for an art historian accustomed to working on Japanese prints, my discovery of whole domains of inquiry including cultural geography and the anthropology of landscape.
Raffaella Fabiani Giannetto (University of Pennsylvania),
“The Medici Gardens of Fifteenth-Century Florence: Conceptualization and Tradition”
The Italian garden of the Renaissance is usually defined as an enclosed pleasance with flowerbeds designed according to a geometric pattern, and trees planted along regularly spaced rows. It often includes a bosquet of evergreens in the background, and terraces connected by symmetrical staircases and ramps. This definition, so often reiterated through the pages of books addressing the history of the Italian garden, is as rigid as is the geometry informing the layout of these verdant places. For not only does it ignore the fact that the notion of an Italian-style garden would have been foreign to anyone living in the Renaissance, but it also takes the very concept of design as self-evident, as if all the gardens of the Italian Renaissance had been conceived as works of art or, more specifically, architecture. In an effort to trace the origin of this style the Medici villas of the Florentine countryside have often been identified as the prototype of the giardino all'italiana, although the evidence to support a reconstruction of their original physical appearance is scanty.
In my doctoral dissertation I offered a different approach to the study of Italian gardens. My research focused on the early Renaissance villas of Trebbio, Cafaggiolo, Careggi, and Fiesole on the outskirts of Florence. The fellowship in Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks has allowed me to turn my dissertation into a book manuscript. Instead of classifying the Medici gardens under specific typological and stylistic headings, which is one of the most common scholarly approaches, and bears the risk of attributing names to places that do not deserve them, my book is an enquiry into the human intentions and motivations that guided the construction and cultivation of gardens, orchards, and kitchen gardens within the early Medici properties. By commenting on the primary and archival sources, I traced the evolution of the relationship between man and the natural environment from the implementation of kitchen gardens and orchards to the design of gardens; that is, from the cultivation of grounds set aside for the growing of vegetables, herbs, and fruit trees for household use or for sale, to the design of outdoor verdant places meant to host pleasurable activities. Also, by taking into account the humanists' own representation of the relationship between man and his environment in their works of literature, i.e. the writings of Petrarch and Boccaccio, I showed how the transition from making to design occurred in literature much earlier than it did in actual reality, and how the Italian language adapted itself, through the introduction of terms often borrowed from other languages, to the evolution of culture, i.e. the creation of gardens.
Finally, the resources of Dumbarton Oaks' garden library, such as Lee Vernon's In Praise of Old Gardens, allowed me to trace the origin of the Italianate garden notion back to the end of the nineteenth century, when members of the Anglo-American colony in Florence started to write about the formal gardens of Italy, with the intent of outlining the principles of design, and to make them available to the new generation of garden designers.
Christian A. Tschumi (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, Switzerland / University of Kyoto, Japan),
“Shin-Sakuteiki: A Manifesto for the Japanese Garden”
Mirei Shigemori created gardens in Japan between 1933 and 1975, refusing to reproduce traditional gardens because they lacked any sense of modernity, and refusing to imitate European gardens because they were out of touch with Japanese culture.
Born in the Japanese countryside near Okayama city, Shigemori went to Tokyo to study painting. After a detour into the field of ikebana, he undertook an extensive survey of gardens in Japan and between 1936 and 1939 published a twenty-six-volume book on the history of the Japanese garden. As a passionate advocate for the renewal of the Japanese garden he felt that innovation had come to a halt around the middle of the Edo period and that gardeners were just repeating what had been done before. With his distinctive garden designs, he wanted to make a true contribution to the renewal of Japanese garden culture.
With the eyes of a painter, Shigemori looked at the garden's plane of gravel as a canvas and its stone arrangements as points. Missing in this picture were lines as well as different colors. This realization led Shigemori to rejuvenate the karesansui, or dry landscape garden. He added lines, colors, and shapes while overlaying the garden with entirely new themes. As a result Shigemori no longer restricted himself to the traditional references of the karesansui garden, which were often historical landscapes or paintings thereof. So in the case of Ryogin-an, for example, we see a dragon producing dark clouds while rising from the sea to the sky, an idea derived from the temple's name.
In his late seventies, after creating more than 240 gardens, Shigemori felt ready to write an update to the Sakuteiki, the ancient garden-making manual. He called it the New- or Shin-Sakuteiki, and it became a passionate manifesto for the renewal of the Japanese garden tradition, resulting in one of the most important contemporary texts regarding the history and theory of garden making in Japan. But surprisingly until now it has never been translated into any Western language. I have during my time at Dumbarton Oaks been working on a complete translation of this text into English. I hope to make it soon accessible to a scholarly audience outside Japan.
Junior Fellow
Katherine Temple von Stackelberg (Trinity College Dublin – University of Dublin),
"Reassessing the Roman Hortus: Cultural Self-Definition and the Aesthetics of Production”
The study of ancient gardens is well positioned between a growing awareness of the importance of environment to social development and a renewed interest in material culture. For this reason, the past twenty-five years have seen increased academic interest in ancient gardens. Dumbarton Oaks has played a significant part in promoting this awareness. In 1979, Dumbarton Oaks hosted the first of two colloquia on ancient Roman gardens, a subject that had until then been generally perceived by classicists as an attractive, but essentially marginal, aspect of Roman culture. The interest sparked at those colloquia resulted in an appreciation of Roman gardens not merely as decorative spaces, but as important cultural material and an integral aspect of the art, architecture, and society of Rome.
The study of the creation, utilization, and representation of Roman garden space participates in the current dialogue concerning the interrelationship between society, landscape, and urban development in the ancient world. My study focuses on the Roman use of garden space to promote and define national and self-image through the rhetorical and visual representation of productivity and consumption. This project addresses the relation between the visual and archaeological evidence for productivity in Roman garden space, and the rhetoric of social anxiety that emerged around the garden as a topos in the late Republic and early Empire. It also traces the reception of the Roman garden that has promoted a binary perception of productive hortus / unproductive Horti into the twenty-first century.
At Dumbarton Oaks, I was in the fortunate position of having access to both the extensive garden library and classical reference works necessary to my project. The Garden Library was particularly useful in enabling me to create a framework for the most difficult aspect of my project, the reception of the ancient garden. This required accessing sources that were wide, varied and, in some cases, very rare. Therefore, it was a vital that I was able to access Robert Castell's The Villas of the Ancients Illustrated (1728), a work more usually studied for its architectural information. Having only previously read excerpts, I was now able ascertain at what points Castell designated elements of garden design as being overtly drawn from a classical context, which were drawn from more contemporary sources, and which of them he considered to be ornamental or utilitarian. This aspect of ancient Roman gardens will expand interest in the ancient garden into new areas of academic dialogue.