Bücher der Reihe New Approaches to Byzantine History and Culture

This book follows the public life of Michael Palaiologos from his early days and upbringing, through to his assumption of the Byzantine imperial throne in 1258. It explores multiple narratives, highlighting the various public communities in the Byzantine polity, primarily focusing on intellectuals and clerks rather than the emperor himself. Drawing on insights from power relations, studies of class and the public sphere, this book provides an account of thirteenth-century Byzantium that highlights the role of communicative and symbolic actions in the public sphere, and argues they were integral to Palaiologos' political success.

¿This book provides a new military history of Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos's campaigns in the Balkans, during the first fourteen years of his rule. While the tactics and manoeuvres Alexios used against Robert Guiscard's Normans are relatively well-known, his strategy in dealing with Pecheneg and Cuman adversaries in the region has received less attention in historical scholarship. This book provides a much-need synthesis of these three closely linked campaigns ¿ often treated as discrete events ¿ revealing a surprising coherence in Alexios' response, and explores the position of Byzantium's army and navy on the eve of the First Crusade.

This book illuminates Byzantines' relationship with woodland between the seventh and twelfth centuries. Drawing from texts, environmental data, and archaeological surveys, this book demonstrates that woodland's makeup was altered after Byzantium's seventh-century metamorphosis, and that people interacted in new ways with this re-worked ecology.

This book is the history of the Eastern Vikings, the Rus and the Varangians, from their earliest mentions in the narrative sources to the late medieval period, when the Eastern Vikings had become stock figures in Old Norse Romances.

This book is an exploration of political memory and disgrace in the reigns of Constantine and his sons.

The contributors embrace religious studies, philosophy, theology, art, and architectural history, to consider the depth of the interaction between the Corpus Dionysiacum and various aspects of contemporary Byzantine and western cultures, including ecclesiastical and lay power, politics, religion, and art.

This book analyzes Byzantine examples of witness literature, a genre that focuses on eyewitness accounts written by slaves, prisoners, refugees, and other victims of historical atrocity.

These pages tap into the current attention paid to plants in a wide range of scholarship, an attention that involves the philosophy of plant life as well as scientific discoveries of how communicative trees may be, and how they defend themselves.

This book examines the Avar siege of Constantinople in 626, one of the most significant events of the seventh century, and the impact and repercussions this had on the political, military, economic and religious structures of the Byzantine Empire.

The traditional concentration on the historically renowned figures of Constantine and Julian is understandable but comes at a significant price: the neglect of the period between the death of Constantine and the reign of Julian and of the rulers who governed the empire in this period.

This book examines the views of Greek Church Fathers on hoarding, saving, and management of economic surplus, and their development primarily in urban centres of the Eastern Mediterranean, from the late first to the fifth century.

This book explores the professional and social lives of the soldiers who served in the army of the Byzantine Empire in the sixth century.

This book examines ideas of spiritual nourishment as maintained chiefly by Patristic theologians -those who lived in Byzantium.

This book examines the gendered dimensions of emotions and the emotional aspects of gender within Byzantine culture and suggests possible readings of such instances.

The contributors embrace religious studies, philosophy, theology, art, and architectural history, to consider the depth of the interaction between the Corpus Dionysiacum and various aspects of contemporary Byzantine and western cultures, including ecclesiastical and lay power, politics, religion, and art.

This book is a microhistory of eleventh-century Byzantium, built around the biography of the state official Michael Attaleiates.

This book examines the remarkable Velestino hoard, found in Thessaly in the 1920s, and analyses the light that this collection of artifacts sheds on a poorly studied period of Byzantine history, and on largely neglected aspects of Byzantine civilization.

This book examines ideas of spiritual nourishment as maintained chiefly by Patristic theologians -those who lived in Byzantium.

This book examines the gendered dimensions of emotions and the emotional aspects of gender within Byzantine culture and suggests possible readings of such instances.