Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Symposia and Colloquia

Becoming Byzantine: Children and Childhood in Byzantium presents detailed information about children’s lives, and provides a basis for further study. This collection of eight articles covers matters relevant to daily life such as the definition of children in Byzantine law, procreation, death, breastfeeding patterns, and material culture.

The Old Testament in Byzantium contains papers from a Dumbarton Oaks symposium based on an exhibition of early Bible manuscripts titled “In the Beginning: Bibles before the Year 1000.” Topics include manifestations of the holy books in Byzantine manuscript illustration, architecture, and government, as well as in Jewish Bible translations.

This book assesses the significance of the embellishment of the church of San Marco of Venice and its immediate surroundings. The authors address the diverse styles, sources, meanings, and significance of this art, offering new insights into the inspiration, purposes, and mutability of San Marco and the myths that inspired and motivated Venetians.

How are markets in antiquity to be characterized? As comparable to modern free markets? As controlled by the State? Or in completely different terms, as free but regulated? Here, scholars address these and related questions by reexamining and reinterpreting records from Byzantium and its hinterland for local, regional, and interregional trade.

Viewing the Morea focuses on the late medieval Morea (Peloponnese), beginning with the bold attempt of Western knights to establish a kingdom on its soil. The authors explore how the groups of this contested region—Crusaders, Orthodox villagers, and Venetians—interacted, asserted identity, and recollected the ancient history of the Peloponnese.

Saints and Sacred Matter explores the embodied aspects of the divine—physical remains of holy men and women and objects associated with them. Contributors explore how relics linked the past and present with an imagined future in essays that discuss Christian and other religious traditions from the ancient world such as Judaism and Islam.

Essays in North Africa under Byzantium and Early Islam include the legacy of Vandal rule in Africa, art and architectural history, archaeology, economics, theology, Berbers, and the Islamic conquest. They examine the ways in which the imperial legacy was re-interpreted, re-imagined, and put to new uses in Byzantine and early Islamic Africa.

The New Testament in Byzantium draws on the current state of textual scholarship and explores aspects of the New Testament, particularly as it was imagined in lectionaries, hymns, homilies, saints’ lives, miniatures, and monuments—framing Byzantine Christian theological inquiry, ecclesiastical controversy, and political thought.

Scholars have attended to aspects of sight and sound in Byzantine culture, but have generally left smell, taste, and touch undervalued and understudied. Through collected essays that redress the imbalance, the volume offers a fresh charting of the Byzantine sensorium as a whole.

The essays in this volume reconsider from a variety of vantage points an early collaborative project of Dumbarton Oaks, which brought together a philologist, an art historian, and an architectural historian to reconstruct their own version of the Church of the Holy Apostles.

The Diagram as Paradigm explores medieval diagrams in Byzantium, the Islamicate world, and the Latin West. Case studies consider the theoretical dimensions of diagramming in historical disciplines ranging from philosophy to cosmology. Four introductory essays provide overviews of diagrammatic traditions of the regions explored in this volume.