European University Institute Library

The invention of Byzantium in early modern Europe, edited by Nathanael Aschenbrenner and Jake Ransohoff

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index

illustrations

index present

non fiction

The invention of Byzantium in early modern Europe

bibliography

1251740375

edited by Nathanael Aschenbrenner and Jake Ransohoff

Extravagantes

"A gulf of centuries separates the "Byzantine Empire" from the academic field of "Byzantine studies." This book offers a new approach to the history of Byzantine scholarship, focusing on the attraction that Byzantium held for Early Modern Europeans and challenging the stereotype that they dismissed the Byzantine Empire as an object of contempt. The authors in this book focus on how and why the Byzantine past was used in Early Modern Europe: to diagnose cultural decline, to excavate the beliefs and practices of early Christians, to defend absolutism or denounce tyranny, and to write strategic ethnography against the Ottomans. By tracing Byzantium's profound impact on everything from politics to painting, this book shows that the empire and its legacy remained relevant to generations of Western writers, artists, statesmen, and intellectuals as they grappled with the most pressing issues of their day. Refuting reductive narratives of absence or progress, this book shows how "Byzantium" underwent multiple overlapping and often discordant reinventions before the institutionalization of "Byzantine studies" as an academic discipline. As this book suggests, it was precisely Byzantium's ambiguity-as both Greek and Roman, ancient and medieval, familiar and foreign-that made it such a vibrant and vital part of the Early Modern European imagination"--, Provided by publisher

Introduction: The invention of Byzantium in early modern Europe / Nathanael Aschenbrenner and Jake Ransohoff -- Part one. Reinventing Byzantium in the fifteenth century: Greek identity and ideas of decline in fifteenth-century Byzantium -- Gemistos Pletho and Bessarion / Fabio Pagani -- Making the Roman past(s) come alive -- Manuel Chrysoloras, Cyriac of Ancona, and Andrea Mantegna's Triumphs of Caesar / Elena Boeck -- Part two. Exploiting and enacting Byzantium, ca. 1500-1750: Western humanists and Byzantine historians / Anthony Grafton -- Martin Crusius's lost Byzantine legacy / Richard Calis -- Editing, lexicography, and history under Louis XIV / Charles Du Cange and La byzantine du Louvre / Teresa Shawcross -- The eighteenth-century reinvention of Du Cange as the French nation's historian / Teresa Shawcross -- Performing Byzantium in early modern theater / Przemysław Marciniak -- Part three. Categorizing and contextualizing Byzantium, ca. 1500-1750: The lexicography of Byzantine Greek -- from Anna Notaras to Johannes Meursius / John Considine -- Erudition, documentation, and organization in the making of early modern Byzantine studies -- the case of Martin Hanke's De Byzantinarum rerum scriptoribus Graecis liber (1677) / William North -- Montfaucon's Byzantium / Shane Bobrycki -- Hagiography, erudition, and the emergence of Byzantinisme (sixteenth-nineteenth centuries) / Xavier Lequeux -- Part four. Chronologies of Byzantium from the Enlightenment to modernity: From the rise of Constantine to the fall of Constantinople -- defining Byzantium and the "Middle Age" in early modern scholarship / Frederic Clark -- From "empire of the Greeks" to "Byzantium" -- the politics of a modern paradigm shift / Anthony Kaldellis -- Conclusion: Byzance avant Byzance: toward a new history of Byzantine scholarship / Nathanael Aschenbrenner and Jake Ransohoff