Volume 78

Articles have not yet been paginated and are presented in alphabetical order by author.

Jack J. Lennon and Nicholas Wilshere, “The Role of Pollution in Agathias’s Histories.”

Throughout Agathias’s Histories, he makes frequent use of religious pollution. This has often gone unnoticed in discussions of his work, as scholars have typically approached the debate in terms of his attitudes to sin. This article aims to correct this by highlighting the numerous occasions in which pollution is not only present, but also plays a pivotal role in Agathias’s narrative and worldview. In particular, Agathias uses pollution to denigrate the actions and customs of outsiders and non-Romans, while simultaneously presenting Romans such as Justinian’s general Narses as being especially concerned with avoiding pollution and maintaining purity.

Edward Hoptioncann, “Revolution in Byzantine Orthopedics: The Treatment of Fractures in the Pragmateia of Paul of Aegina.”

Surgery on the spine, the resection of fractured ribs, the operative excision of superfluous callus, and the surgical correction of malunions represent some of the principal achievements of a revolution in surgery during the Byzantine period. While fractures in the ancient world were seldom treated surgically and there was little knowledge of their pathological anatomy, an increased confidence in the capabilities of surgery accompanied by a proliferation in the study of anatomy enabled Byzantine physicians to transform the field of orthopedics. Skeletons for anatomical study, once confined to Alexandria, became widespread, and those fabled dissections practiced in this same city were resurrected across the empire alongside novel clinical autopsies. Paul of Aegina, a witness to this revolution, recorded these developments in his magnum opus, the Pragmateia, providing tantalizing summaries of these operations—many of which would only return to the surgical repertoire in modern times.

Yannis Stouraitis, “Whose War Ethic? Dominant versus Subaltern Ideas about Just War in Byzantine Society.”

This article explores subaltern views of just war in Byzantium in an effort to trace overlaps and differences with the imperial ideology of just war. The first part deals with the issue of emic and etic approaches to conceptions of “just war” and “holy war” in medieval East Roman culture. Focusing on the content of modern categories of analysis and their relationship with the categories of practice attested in our sources, the article argues that the former can better help us interpret and understand Byzantine ideas about the justification of war. The second part is focused mainly on Byzantine sources from the period between the seventh and the tenth centuries. It revisits evidence using an innovative theoretical lens to examine the existence of differentiated ideological approaches to just war within Byzantine society.

David Wagschal, “The Old Gloss on the Nomocanon in Fourteen Titles: Introduction and Edition.”

This article provides an edition of a set of scholia that frequently accompany the nomocanonical portion of the Nomocanon in Fourteen Titles. Particularly common in pre-twelfth century manuscripts, these scholia represent the only extant “commentary” on the nomocanon stricto sensu before the well-known work of Theodore Balsamon. The introduction to the edition situates the scholia within the broader context of Byzantine canonical literature, reviewing their content, form, and their general significance within the tradition of Byzantine church law. Possible dates for the scholia are considered, and it is concluded that the scholia must date to at least the tenth century, and likely earlier—perhaps even as early as the seventh century.

Dorota Zaprzalska, “Composite Icons of Cyprus.”

Panayotis L. Vocotopoulos was the first to write about the appearance of icons consisting of two panels, one inserted into another, and also the first to propose a term for the phenomenon: composite icons (σύνθετες εικόνες). This paper presents a group of Cypriot icons of this category, dating mostly to the sixteenth century, as well as icons imitating this form or inspired by it. The aim is not only to expand the known body of such icons assembled by Vocotopoulos but also to show the unique features of some Cypriot examples, hitherto unstudied and with no analogies elsewhere, thus highlighting the internal diversity of the phenomenon of embedding and embedded icons. Paying close attention to their various material forms allows one to see them as physical objects to be touched, opened, and carried, or to notice unusual details, such as movable wings installed at the height of the inset icon allowing for its concealment and revelation. This article argues that the relationship between the embedded and embedding icons in the Cypriot examples is more complex than the one between a frame and a framed object and that the role of larger panels goes far beyond the protection of the inset icon. It also prompts further questions regarding the possible subsequent use of such icons, reconsiders the act of insertion, and contributes to a better understanding of this unusual way of reusing icons.

Justin Willson and David Jenkins, “Theophanes of Nicaea and the Diagram That Draws and Erases Itself.”

In the late Byzantine period, theologians began drawing diagrams of the Trinity to argue against the Catholic doctrine of the Filioque. Neither as iconographic as an icon panel, nor as abstract as a syllogism, the drawings, usually executed with pen and ink, articulated the relationship between the three persons of the Christian God. Almost all of the diagrams were designed on the format of an equilateral triangle inscribed in a circle, but an important, overlooked exception is the cycle of diagrams that is the focus of this article. In book three of his Contra Latinos, written after 1368 in response to the Latinophile monk Demetrios Kydones, Theophanes of Nicaea introduces a sequence of twenty-one diagrams. Unlike his predecessors’ trinitarian drawings, Theophanes’ cycle is based on the format of a center point and concentric circles, a design that has a late antique, Neoplatonic precedent. This article introduces the intellectual context of Theophanes’ text, sketches the argument of his drawings, examines the concept of regress in the diagrams, and relates the concentric-circular design to mandorlas in Byzantine art. It concludes with the first edition and translation of his cycle of diagrams.

Anthony Ellis, “Neo-Pagan Editing in Late Byzantine Sparta: Or, How Gemistos Pletho Rewrote His Herodotus.”

This article explores the unusual editorial activities of the neo-pagan philosopher Gemistos Pletho over several decades before the Ottoman conquest of Greece. It focuses on Pletho’s copy of Herodotus’s Histories, today in Florence, and uses a new method to identify, date, and contextualize a wide range of textual alterations, from brilliant philological conjectures to creative rewriting in a close imitation of Herodotus’s dialect and style. Several of Pletho’s interventions reflect his idiosyncratic pagan theology and shed new light on the religious views he held in the 1430s, when Bessarion studied with him and before his trip to the Council of Union in Ferrara-Florence, where he made waves among Italian humanists. Long hailed by his contemporaries and successors as a “Second Plato” who gave a decisive impulse to Renaissance Platonism, the ink on Pletho’s fingers places him in a long tradition of scholars preoccupied with theological forgery and conspiracy.

Samet Budak, “Teaching Greek, Studying Philosophy, and Discovering Ancient Knowledge at the Ottoman Court in the Fifteenth Century.”

This article introduces and examines an understudied corpus of Greek language handbooks commissioned by the Ottoman court during the reign of Mehmed II (r. 1451–1481). As a result of the multicultural and multilingual nature of the Ottoman court of the era, these primers include teaching material in a number of languages, but the most comprehensive portions of the primers are devoted to the domains of Greek grammar and vocabulary. Drawing from untouched and neglected sources, this article argues that these introductory textbooks can be aptly situated within the context of the Greek scriptorium and court library of the Ottomans in Constantinople. This article’s core argument is that Greek primers used at the Ottoman court were intended to help students learn not only the skills necessary for diplomatic correspondence and chancery but also the skills necessary for exploring ancient knowledge, particularly in the fields of philosophy and science. This engagement with Greek scholarship emanated from an antiquarian-like fascination prevailing within the Ottoman court, which in turn was indicative of a broader interconnected discourse permeating the Mediterranean world during this period.