Dumbarton Oaks Papers 75 (2021)
Dumbarton Oaks Papers, vol. 75.
Margaret Mullett, “Ruth Juliana Macrides (1949–2019),” vi1–6.
Annemarie Weyl Carr, “The Lady and the Juggler: Mary East and West,” 7–40.
During the autumn of 2018, Dumbarton Oaks’s museum hosted an exhibition about a medieval beneficial tale and its many-faceted modernist revival. About a juggler-monk and the Virgin Mary, it belongs to a kind of beneficial miracle tale that originated in the very early Christian East. Yet the Mary who steps into it, and perhaps most especially the form of the monk’s devotion to her, belong to the medieval West. The story stimulated curiosity about the figure of the medieval Mary, both East and West. Three articles were solicited for DOP, this one devoted to the character and evolution of the Mary encountered in the tale. The monk’s ardent, virile devotion implies a Mary both lofty and desirable like the bridal Lady of the Coronation of the Virgin. This figure’s roots run back to the early Christian legends of Mary’s death, as visualized in the Byzantine scene of the Dormition; her deployment of the textile relic of Mary’s veil draws on Byzantine precedent. But her development is distinctively Western. It begins in the Carolingian adoption of Rome’s unique liturgy for the Dormition feast, based on the Song of Songs; is sustained by the Ottonian/Salian alignment of Mary with the queen as spouse of the ruler; is inflected by the devotional template of devotee as the bride of Christ; and is consummated by the twelfth-century commentaries equating Mary with the Song’s bride. It yields a uniquely Western figure, steeped in the romance and eventually the abjection of the spousal Mary.
Robert S. Nelson, “A Miniature Mosaic Icon of St. Demetrios in Byzantium and the Renaissance,” 41–84.
A Byzantine miniature mosaic in Sassoferrato, Italy, has long been studied more for its frame than the mosaic. This paper first examines the mosaic of ca. 1300, especially the rampant lion on St. Demetrios’s shield, and suggests that Michael Glabas Tarchaneiotes was its patron. A century and half later, the icon was reframed and enclosed in a painted wooden box. This double reframing associates the ensemble with Pope Paul II (1464–71), the principal European collector of miniature mosaic icons. The frame’s Greek letterforms are shown to be ancient, not Byzantine, and simulate the stoichedon style of Greek epigraphy during the fifth to fourth centuries BCE. It is argued that Thomas Palaiologos had the icon reframed as a gift to Paul II.
Nektarios Zarras, “Illness and Healing: The Ministry Cycle in the Chora Monastery and the Literary Oeuvre of Theodore Metochites,” 85–120.
This article proposes an interpretation of the cycle of the Ministry and Miracles of Christ through Metochites’ innermost thoughts, beliefs, and contemplations, which are passionately defended in his writings and are illustrated in the Chora Monastery. Through the patron’s literary oeuvre and his deep relationship with Chora, the messages of the Ministry cycle is interpreted as well as its obvious particularities in relation to the established iconography of the period, giving us an insight into Metochites’ soul. More specifically, the personal relationship between the patron’s life and philosophical conspectus and the extensive cycle of the Healings in the narthexes of Chora is elucidated. Metochites’ focus on illness and healing, as evidenced in his writings and in the mosaics, in essence projects his personal anxiety over the contradiction of his life, a contradiction between the ideal of knowledge and the darkening of the intellect, the spiritual rise and the mental fall.
Sihong Lin, “Justin under Justinian: The Rise of Emperor Justin II Revisited,” 121–42.
This article revisits the career of Emperor Justin II (r. 565–578) prior to his accession. Although he does not appear frequently in the sources, it is nonetheless possible to piece together the future emperor’s networks and examine his ties with the imperial aristocracy. While Justin’s chief dynastic competitor, a military-minded relative also named Justin, has generally received a positive reception among Byzantinists, our protagonist has not, in no small part thanks to military defeats and policy failures in the 570s. The decades before his reign, however, were very different, and we can reconstruct from the sources an active individual whose broad responsibilities and connections no doubt helped him to secure the throne in 565. Furthermore, through a prosopographical comparison of the two Justins’ families and allies, it becomes all the more clear why Justin II succeeded his uncle, for he had possessed strong ties to the houses of Empress Theodora and Emperor Anastasius and had friends who were increasingly prominent in court life in the final years of Justinian.
Max Ritter, “The Byzantine Afterlife of Procopius’s Buildings,” 143–70.
Three works of Procopius of Caesarea have come down to us, the Buildings being one of them. This article reviews the text’s reception history during the subsequent Byzantine period. It investigates how the text was used for the reconstruction of the Justinianic past in the Byzantine Empire and how later authors evaluated and accessed the text. Although the text’s reception was narrow in scope, the study gives insight into the interests of the Byzantine audience and of the text’s transmission.
Pavel Murdzhev, “The Introduction of the Moldboard Plow to Byzantine Thrace in the Eleventh Century,” 171–204.
By exploring archaeological data collected over the last 35 years from the territory of Thrace, a region located in present Bulgaria, Greece, and the European part of Turkey, this paper rationalizes the introduction of the moldboard (heavy) plow to the clay soils of Thrace in the eleventh century. It demonstrates that the moldboard plow arrived in Thrace along with the Moesian population that was relocated en masse by Byzantine authorities to Thrace after the impact of the devastating Pecheneg raids of the first half of the eleventh century. The adoption of the plow in Byzantine Thrace displays the purely opportunistic nature of technological diffusion—it resulted from the pursuit of economic sustenance, in which the tilling device used for the heavy chernozems of Moesia appeared to suit very well the demanding vertisols of Thrace—and the institutional rationale of the Byzantine state.
David Gyllenhaal, “Byzantine Melitene and the Social Milieu of the Syriac Renaissance,” 205–36.
Taking as its starting point the seminal 1976 article on “L’immigration syrienne” by Gilbert Dagron, this article reevaluates the evidence for the Syrian Orthodox population of Melitene after the Byzantine reconquest and before the advent of Turkish dominion. A reexamination of Dagron’s conclusions in favor of a “dual policy” of tolerance on the frontier and intolerance in Antioch in light of recent scholarship does not lend support to this theory. Instead, more careful attention to contemporary sources in Arabic reveal the extent to which Byzantine imperial policy toward the Syrian Orthodox appears as a straightforward resumption of the curious pattern of persecuting systole and tolerant diastole which marked sixth-and seventh-century relations. The evidence reveals the extent to which the “frontier society” of Syrian Orthodox Melitene was not peripheral to the empire, but central. The disciplinary boundaries which have separated the discussions of Byzantine Studies and Syriac Studies of this crucial period have done much to conceal this fact, but this barrier must be overcome in the future.
Esra Akin-Kivanç, “In the Mirror of the Other: Imprints of Muslim–Christian Encounters in the Late Antique and Early Medieval Mediterranean,” 237–62.
This study is a reevaluation of a calligraphic form known in Islamic art as muthanna, or mirror writing. Previous scholarship has maintained that muthanna originated in Iran between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries CE. This misassumption, which in part resulted from oversight of mirror compositions rendered in non-Arabic scripts, led scholars to celebrate muthanna as a novelty of Muslim artists and a “pure” trademark of Islamic art. Pointing out muthanna’s relationship with reversed, repeated, and symmetrically arranged unidirectional inscriptions from pre- and non-Islamic contexts, this study traces the art form’s history to Late Antiquity (the era of transition from Byzantine to Islamic rule in the eastern Mediterranean region), and attributes its creation to workshops in Syria-Palestine, Egypt, and Constantinople. An examination of inscriptions on portable objects and textiles helps to date mirror compositions with greater certainty to the seventh century, decades before the canons of Islamic calligraphy were defined. This chronological and geographical revision, in turn, establishes the fact that muthanna is not an exclusively Islamic art form that was created in a void segregated from non-Islamic cultural, artistic, or religiopolitical enterprises. Contrary to the widespread misbelief, this study proposes that mirror writing was formed and transformed within the intricate and dynamic networks of Late Antique and early Medieval artists, patrons, and consumers, which transcended the divides between paganism and monotheism, Christianity and Islam, East and West, center and periphery. Within this new framework, muthanna becomes a distinct, if long misunderstood, example of cross-cultural exchange that contributes to our growing understanding of Christian and Muslim encounters in the visual realm.
Anna Chrysostomides, “John of Damascus’s Theology of Icons in the Context of Eighth-Century Palestinian Iconoclasm,” 263–96.
John of Damascus, in his Three Treatises on the Divine Images, used traditional Christian arguments defending images against the accusation of idolatry in reaction to a larger conversation between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the Umayyad heartlands. The Treatises were likely intended to be a summa theologica of the Christian theology of icons in what would have appeared to Umayyad Christians to be a chaotic time, yet were also written in a form that could be used as a handbook for disputation among other Christians or with local Jews and Muslims. Discussions of idolatry and images present in Jewish and Muslim texts and material evidence closely parallel arguments within John of Damascus’ Treatises suggesting a larger monotheistic conversation.
Jonathan L. Zecher, “Myths of Aerial Tollhouses and Their Tradition from George the Monk to the Life of Basil the Younger,” 297–318.
The “aerial tollhouses” are a uniquely Byzantine formulation of how souls experience judgment and its consequences after death. The fullest formulation of this narrative is found in the tenth-century Life of Basil the Younger, but makes appearances earlier in the Life of John the Almsgiver, Ps.-Anastasios’ Narrations, a cento homily falsely attributed to Cyril of Alexandria, and, most importantly, in the ninth-century Chronicon of George the Monk. This essay reads George’s presentation of the tollhouses as well as the lengthy patristic florilegia he appends to it in conversation with theories of anthology and Bruce Lincoln’s theory of myth as ideology. In this way, it is shown that George shapes the tollhouse myth around emerging practices of confession and repentance, and reads those practices into earlier patristic traditions. The ideology of confession emerges even more clearly in the Life of Basil the Younger, in which the tollhouses are made into a memory map for preparing for confession. The logic of the tollhouses is thus determined in large part by social pressures, economies of clerical and lay power, and literary aesthetics. The conclusion draws consequences for how “tradition” operates in the creation of Byzantine anthologies more broadly, as opposed to how it appears in the end-products.
Aleksandr Andreev, “The Order of the Hours in the Yaroslavl Horologion,” 319–46.
The author discusses the order of the hours in a unique Slavonic manuscript dated to the thirteenth century, Yaroslavl Museum 15481 (the “Yaroslavl Horologion”), which contains a fragment of the twelve-hour cursus of daytime Hours. The structure of the Hours, the selection of the prayers, and the choice of hymnography at the Hours in the Yaroslavl Horologion and other manuscripts of the Slavonic Studite Horologion are analyzed. The author shows that the selection of psalms at the Hours in this manuscript differs from the selection of psalms in the known Greek Horologion manuscripts of a similar structure, as well as from the selection of psalms at the Mid-Hours in related Slavonic and Greek Horologia. The author concludes that the Yaroslavl manuscript presents a unique attempt to adapt the Studite Horologion for the private prayer rule of a monk. In the appendix, texts of previously unpublished prayers of the Hours from the Yaroslavl Horologion are presented and Greek equivalents, where known, are indicated.
“On Being Conquered in Byzantium: Dumbarton Oaks Symposium, 16–17 April 2021,” 347–48.