{"id":36279,"date":"2018-08-07T01:00:44","date_gmt":"2018-08-07T05:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=36279"},"modified":"2020-08-15T17:15:01","modified_gmt":"2020-08-15T21:15:01","slug":"qotd-sailing-past-byzantium","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/08\/07\/qotd-sailing-past-byzantium\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Sailing past Byzantium"},"content":{"rendered":"

To those who know nothing about the mediaeval, \u201cbyzantine\u201d East of Christendom (and what do I know about anything?) a book by the respectable Oxford scholar, Averil Cameron, is worth mentioning. It is a short survey of developments in her academic field, entitled, Byzantine Matters<\/em> (2014). It poses five basic questions on which our common assumptions are mostly wrong, and provides succinct directions for thinking again.<\/p>\n

Mediaeval Greece, the Byzantine dynasties, and Orthodox Christianity: these are far from interchangeable concepts. Moreover, \u201cByzantine art\u201d \u2014 the focus of enthusiasm in the anglosphere through the last century or so \u2014 is misunderstood. The term \u201cByzantine\u201d itself \u2014 conceived from late antiquity as a deprecation \u2014 persists in the academy as an intelligence neutralizer. The vanity of \u201cthe West\u201d gets in the way of appreciating a parallel Christian realm, which flourished for more than a thousand years, and never succumbed to the Arabs. (It finally succumbed to the Turks.) We disdain what amounts to an alternative universe of Christian witness and high culture, of great variety and depth, even more obtusely than we disdain our own Middle Ages.<\/p>\n

We are narrowed and prejudiced by the attitudinizing of Edward Gibbon, and the inheritance (or disinheritance) of our Western \u201cEnlightenment,\u201d to view as backward a civilization in most ways superior to our \u201cmodern\u201d own, from pride in the tinsel of technology. From AD 330 (the founding of Constantine\u2019s capital) to 1453 (when it fell into Ottoman hands), we see only a continuous story of \u201cdecline.\u201d But there were many declines over this vast period, and in the intervals between them, many recoveries.<\/p>\n

David Warren, “Sailing past Byzantium”, Essays in Idleness<\/em><\/a>, 2016-11-07.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To those who know nothing about the mediaeval, \u201cbyzantine\u201d East of Christendom (and what do I know about anything?) a book by the respectable Oxford scholar, Averil Cameron, is worth mentioning. It is a short survey of developments in her academic field, entitled, Byzantine Matters (2014). It poses five basic questions on which our common […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,7,370,41],"tags":[858,360,47,1393,1343],"class_list":["post-36279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-history","category-middle-east","category-quotations","tag-byzantium","tag-christianity","tag-islam","tag-ottomanempire","tag-romanempire"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9r9","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36279"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36279\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54338,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36279\/revisions\/54338"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}