Byzantine Studies Conference Archives

TWENTY-FIFTH ANNUAL BYZANTINE STUDIES CONFERENCE

Abstracts of Papers

The Byzantine Studies Conference is an annual forum for the presentation and discussion of papers embodying current research on all aspects of Byzantine history and culture. The Abstracts of Papers booklet is produced from camera-ready copy supplied by the speakers.

Copyright (C) is reserved by the individual speakers.

Copies of the Abstracts are available for purchase. Subscriptions for Series 5 (21-25, 1995-1999) are available for $45 as a set, or $9 per copy. Series 4 (1620, 1990-1994) is available for $30 (without No. 18 which is out of print), with individual copies costing $7.50 each. Series 3 (11-15, 1985-89) is also available for $30, individual copies $7.50 each. Series 2 (6-10, 1980-84) is available for $20, with individual copies costing $6.50 each. Nos 3, 4 & 5 area available individually for $6.50 each. These prices include postage. All other numbers are out of print. All orders must be prepaid in U.S. currency; make checks payable to the Byzantine Studies Conference and send orders to:

Prof. Sharon Gerstel
Dept. of Art History and Archaeology
The University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742-1335

Abstracts of papers - Byzantine Studies Conference, Ist-1975-Madison, Wis. [etc]
Byzantine Studies Conference v.22 cm. annual
Key Title: Abstracts of Papers - Byzantine Studies Conference
ISSN 0147-3387
1. Byzantine Empire ö Congresses
DF501 .5b9a 949.5 77-79346
Library of Congress 77 MARC-S

The cover illustration is a detail of a sixth-century mosaic pavement with an inhabited vine rinceau inscribed primarily with animals, birds, and with some human figures associated with vintaging. It was excavated in 1994-1995 by the Combined Caesarea Expeditions under the direction of Kenneth G. Holum. Photo by Aaron Levin.

Alice-Mary Talbot (Dumbarton Oaks): The Byzantine Studies Conference 1975-1999. Looking Back after the First 25 Years

Session I: Plenary Session

Thomas F Mathews (Institute of Fine Arts, NYU): Panel Paintings of Late Antiquity: A Preliminary Report on the Project

C. S. Lightfoot (Metropolitan Museum of Art): Excavations at Amorium 1988-1998

Margaret Mullett (Queen's Univ., Belfast): Twenty-five Years of Byzantine Literature: The Case of the Letter-collection of Theophlact of Ochrid

Nina Garsoian (Columbia Univ): Sirapie Der Nersessian in America

Igor Robert Blake (Univ. of California): In Search of Byzantium: The Life of Robert Pierpont Blake

Willim L. MacDonald (Washington. D.C.): Thomas Whittemore, 1871-1950

Session III: Death, Demons & Deviants.

Eric A. Ivison (College of Staten Island, CUNY): A "Profit·Extraordinarily Accursed": Grave-robbing in Medieval Byzantium

Patrick Viscuso (Chantilly, Va.): Vampires, Not Mothers: The Living Dead in the Canonical Responses of Joasaph of Ephesos

Jacquelyn Tuerk (Univ. of Chicago): Magic, Words and Images: an Early Byzantine Amulet and its Semiotics

Session IV. Session In Honor of Seka Allen.

Slobodan Curcic (Princeton Univ): Byzantine or Romanesque? The Question of Style in Medieval Ecclesiastical Architecture of Serbia

Ruth E. Kolarik (Colorado College): Question: of Intent and Interpretation in Sixth-Century Balkan Floor Mosaics

Dusan Korac (Univ. of Maryland): All the Emperor's Men: Political Loyalty and Economic Power in Fourteenth-Century Byzantine Macedonia

Eunice Dauterman Maguire (Krannert Art Museum, Univ. of Illinois): Tame Cheetahs and Woven Luxury in the Early Byzantine Period

Ljubica D. Popovich (Vanderbilt Univ): A Contribution toward Identifying Some of the Figures in the Five Domes of the Virgin Ljeviska in Prizren

Session V. Ecclesiastical Politics.

Stephen Bartlett (St. Louis Univ): The Sacrificial Lamb: The Importance of the Byzantine Eucharistic Rite in the Azyma Controversy

Patrick Gray (York Univ.): Misrepresenting an Ecumenical Council: The Short Latin Version of the Acts of Constantinople II

Michad Gaddis (Syracuse Univ): High Crimes and Misdemeanors: Impeaching the Late Antique Bishop

Tia. M. Kolbaba (Princeton Univ.): Who Made Michael Keroularios a Hero (or Villain) in the History of the Schism between Rome and Constantinople?

Adam Schor (Univ. of Michigan): Genuine Heretics, Genuine Heroes: The Origenist Controversy and the Historiography of Rufinus of Aquilea

Session VI Iconography.

Warren T. Woodfin (Univ. of Illinois): Things Terrible to Speak of and to Behold: Ekphrases of the Studios Apse Mosaic and its Significance

Alfred BŸchler (Berkeley, Calif.): The Triumph of Orthodoxy, the Christological Dispute of 1160-1166, and the Titulus of the Cross in Byzantium

Bissera V. Pentcheva (Harvard Univ.): A New Image of the Virgin in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Constantinople

Alison S. Locke (Yale Univ.): Monte Sant'Angelo or Mont-Saint Michel? The Problem of Site-Specificity

Erica. Cruikshank Dodd (Univ. of Victoria): From Jerusalem to Arles: The Syrian Connection

Session VII. Architecture.

Robert Ousterhout (Univ.of Illinois): Recovering the Pantocrator

Carolyn S. Snively (Gettysburg College): Recent Investigations in the Rotunda Church at Konjuh

Vasileios Marinis (Univ. of Illinois). St. Nicholas in-the-Fields and the Question of Imitation in Byzantine Architecture

Christina Maranci (Massachusetts College of Art): A Reconsideration of Methodology in the Study of Armenian Architecture

Session VIII. Reading Byzantine Literature.

Derek Krueger (Univ. of North Carolina at Greensboro). The Hagiographical Logos: Theology and Literary Composition in the Early Christian East

Frederica Ciccolella De Luigi (Columbia Univ.): John of Gaza's Anacreontic Poetry: Genres and Audience

Maria Mavroudi (Berkeley, California): Arabic-Greek Herbal Glossaries and the Appearance of Arabic Medical Terms in Greek Manuscripts

Elizabeth A. Fisher (The George Washington Univ.): Planoudes, Ovid, and the Byzantine Audience for Latin Literature

Session IX: Church Treasures: Session In Honor of Margaret Frazer.

David Buckton (British Museum & Courtauld Institute): The Enamels of the Pala d'Oro John Osborne (Univ of Victoria): The Portrait of Doge Ordelaffo Falier on the Pala d'Oro

Holger A. Klein (Univ of Bonn & Walters Art Gallery): Lost Treasures: Three Closely Related Byzantine Reliquaries of the True Cross

Vera von Falkenhousen (Universitˆ di Roma - Tor Vergata): Treasure Inventories from Greek Monasteries in Southern Italy and Sicily (10th to 12th Century)

Nancy P. Sevcenko (Philadelphia, Pa): Icons out of the Mainstream: Some Peculiar Icon Types Listed in Byzantine Inventories

Session X: Late Antiquity.

R.Scott Moore (Ohio State Univ): The Current State of Byzantine Archeology on Cyprus

Irfan Shah”d (Georgetown Univ): The Reservoirs of Sergiopolis

Jodi Magness (Tufts Univ): The Decline of Syria-Palestine in the Mid-Sixth Century: A Reconsideration of the Archeological Evidence from Dehes

Hugh Elton (Florida State Univ): The Economy of Southern Anatolia in Early Byzantine History

Charles Pazdernik (Emory Univ): A Dangerous Liberty and a Servitude Free from Care: The Case of Victorinus

Frank M. Clover (Univ of Wisconsin, Madison): The House of Aelia Verina

Session XI: Crusader Greece and Cyprus.

Glenn Peers (Univ. of Texas at Austin): On the Vita Icon of St. George in Athens

Monika Hirschbichler (Univ of Maryland): The Legend of Alexander the Great in the Morea: Two Paintings from the Gatehouse of Akronauplia, Greece

Lynn M. Snyder (Smithsonian Institution) Frankish Meals in Greece: The Identification and Recognition of an Invader's Cuisine

John Rosser (Boston College): Saranda Kolones Castle in Paphos, Cyprus

Session XII. Byzantine Ritual.

BŽatrice Caseau (Collge de France/Paris IV: Sorbonne): Emperor and Incense: Towards a Reinterpretation of Imperial Rituals in the Churches

Bernadette McNary-Zak (St. Bonaventure Univ): Reassessing the Ritual for the Remission in the Pachomian Movement

Lilliana Simeonova (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences): Emperor Leo the Wise: A Reformer of Byzantine Ceremonial

James C. Skedros (Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology): Ritual and the Panegyris. A Byzantine Institution Revisited

Session XII. The Medieval Balkans.

Cyril Pavlikianov (Univ of Sofia "St. Clement of Ochrid"): Eusebios: A Descendent of a Serbian Sebastokrator and Athonite Monk

Svetlana Popovic (Greenbelt, Md.): The Monastery Settlement Revealed: The Case of Mileseva

Srdjan Djuric (Univ of Toronto) The Painter Manuel Panselinos: Towards a Reconstruction of the Opus (ca. 1295-1312)

George Stricevic (Univ. of Cincinnati): Chronology Gracanica Frescoes

Session XIV. Viewing the Object.

Anthony Cutler (Pennsylvania State Univ.): Out of the Mauss Trap: Byzantine Gifts and Gift Exchange in the Light of Arab Sources

Leslie Brubaker (Univ. of Birmingham, England): Iconoclasm and the Trier Ivory

John Hanson (Indiana Univ. of Pennsylvania): The New York Deesis Casket and Middle Byzantine Gospel Frontispieces

Lynn Jones (Philadelphia, Pa): Byzantine Identity and Relics of the True Cross

David H. Wright (Univ. of California; Berkeley): The Menil Paten

Session XV: Byzantium's Borders.

Ralph W. Mathisen (Univ. of Souh Carolina): Sigisvult the Patrician, Maximus the Arian, and "Impossible Missions" ca. 425-440

Laura Reynolds Fry (Univ.of South Carolina): The Code of Euric: Origin, Transmissions, and Implications

Walter F. Kaegi (Univ. of Chicago): The Experiences of Heraclius in Africa

Pamela G. Sayre (Henry Ford Community College): Odenathus of Palmyra, Theodoric, and the Ghassanid Phylarchs: Late Roman Client-Kings?

Ian Mladjov (Univ. of Michigan): A New Look at Byzantium's Neighbors in the Tenth Century (Bulgaria, Magyars, and Greeks in Byzantine and Hungarian Sources)

Session XVI. Early Byzantine Spirituality.

Monica J. Blanchard (Catholic Univ. of America): The Syriac Discourses of Bhisho' Kamulaya (fl. 8th c.) On the Monastic Way of Life

Jennifer L. Hevelone-Harper (Gordon College): The Education of a Holy Man: The Spiritual Development of John of Gaza

William North (Carleton College): Rethinking a Rigorist: Eulogius of Alexandria's On Economy in its Sixth-Century Context

Witold Witakowski (Uppsala Univ.): The Eschatological Program of the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius

Session XVII. Byzantine Women.

Ruma, Niyogi (Univ. of Chicago): The Exotic Among the Other: Writing Women in Byzantine Studies

M. P. Vinson (Bloomington, Ind.): Sexual Slander in Byzantium

Eustratios Papaioannou (Univ. of Vienna): Images of Women in Michael Psellos' Literary Work.

Session XVIII. Egyptian Monasticism.

Kirsti Copeland (Princeton Univ): The Date of the Apocalypse of Paul: State of the Field and Beyond

Darlene Brooks-Hedstrom (Miami Univ): Monastic Practice and the Solitude of the Cell in Christian Egypt

Nicola Aravecchia (Univ. of Minnesota): The Architecture of the Kellia. A Comparative Study on the Use of Space

Elizabeth S. Bolman (Temple Univ.). The Discovery of Early Byzantine Paintings in the Monastery of St. Antony at the Red Sea (Egypt)

Session XIX: The Classical Tradition.

Denis E. Sullivan (Univ. of Maryland): John Doxopatres' On Hermogenes' Peri Staseon: An Eleventh-century Approach to the Pedagogy of Rhetoric

Richard A. Layton (Univ. of Illinois): Biblical Scholarship and Greek Paidea: Philosophical Education and Cultural Competition in Late-Antique Alexandria

Alain Touwaide (Madrid/Dumbarton Oaks): The Tradition of Classical Medicine in Byzantium: Towards a Reconsideration

Katerina Ierodiakonou (Technical Univ of Athens): The Anti-Logical Movement in Byzantium

Marios Philippides (Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst): History Repeats Itself: Constantinople 1453 and the Sack of Troy

Session XX: Medieval Georgia.

Ketevan Mikeladze (Chubinshvili Institute of Georgian Art History, Tbilisi): The Murals of the King Davit Narin Chapel at Gelati Monastery

Elena Boeck (Yale Univ.): Projecting Mixed Messages: Marketing Monarchs in Medieval Georgia

Irine Nikoleishvili (Tbilisi State Univ.) & Irakli Iakobashvili (Kekelidze Institute of Manuscripts, Georgian Academy of Sciences): A Relief from the St George Church of Mokvi: "Excommunication" of the Clergyman

Cornelia B. Horn (Catholic Univ. of America): Befriending the Christian Romans or the Impious Persians? The Vita Petri Iberi on Byzantine Georgian Relations in the Fifth Century A.D.

Session XXI: Manuscript Illumination.

Georgi Parpulov (Univ. of Chicago): Texts and Miniatures from Codex Dionysiou 65

Mary-Lyon Dolezal (Univ. of Oregon): Lectionary Dissonance. The Palaiologina Group, Again

Ferdinanda Florence (Univ of Maryland): The Sacrifice of Isaac in Armenian Illumination and Ritual Sacrifice in Medieval Armenia

Rima E. Smine (Institute of Fine Arts, NYU): The Byzantine Iconographic Sources of Syriac Lectionaries: Vatican Syr 559 and London British Library Add. 7170

Session XXII: Archeology and Material Culture.

Franz Alto Bauer (Deutsches ArchŠologisches Institut, Rome): The Constantinian Episcopal Basilica in Ostia: A Preliminary Report on the Excavation

Timothy F. Gregory (The Ohio State Univ.): Archeology and Slavic Settlement of the Byzantine Peloponnesos

John Cotsonis (Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology): Saints and Cult Centers: The Evidence of the Seals

Peter Lampinen (Combined Caesarea Expeditions): Metallurgical Analysis of Coins of Constantine XI. The Last Coinage Issue of Constantinople

Alice-Mary Talbot (Dumbarton Oaks)

On this occasion of the 25th anniversary of the establishment of the Byzantine Studies Conference, it seems appropriate to take a few moments to reflect on the genesis of the conference and its evolution over the past twenty-five years, coincidentally the final quarter of the 20th century. Space permits only a brief sketching of the history of the BSC, and a few personal reflections and observations as one of the co-founders, who was "present at the creation".

I believe one can trace the origins of the BSC back to 1972 when the Senior Fellows at Dumbarton Oaks decided to make a momentous one-time departure from the traditional program of the annual spring symposium. Up to that year, and thereafter, Dumbarton Oaks symposia had been organized around a unifying theme, with one or more symposiarchs planning the program and inviting appropriate speakers, who were typically established scholars of a certain age and predominantly male. In 1972 the decision was made to invite a number of younger scholars who had recently completed their dissertations to speak on their research in progress; the symposium was entitled "Current Work in Medieval and Byzantine Studies". Nine papers were delivered, four by men, five by women; clearly change was in the wind. I would argue that this D.O. symposium served to "heighten the consciousness" of North American Byzantinists: they came to realize that there existed no forum in this country for the presentation of papers on current research in Byzantine studies, especially by younger scholars. In the words of Walter Kaegi, co-founder of the BSC, "No existing learned society or annual meeting in the early 1970s could or would provide sufficient annual space on their program for a critical mass, not merely a token representation, of interdisciplinary Byzantinists to communicate and discuss their latest research. The unwillingness of the 1974 American Historical Association's program committee to accept a full complement of Byzantine applicants was one of several catalysts for the creation of a new specialized conference." Approaches were made to a number of societies and conferences for some form of affiliation, but in the end this kind of arrangement was rejected because no single group could accommodate the wide range of interests of Byzantinists.

Consequently, shortly after the D.O. symposium returned to its usual format in 1973, a group of Byzantinists who were mostly in their thirties or early forties decided to launch a new conference designed to "serve as an annual forum for the presentation and discussion of papers embodying the current research on all aspects of Byzantine history and culture". It was deliberately scheduled for the fall, to balance the spring symposium at D.O., and was open to scholars of all ages, including graduate students. To ensure the quality of papers abstracts were to be submitted to a program committee, which would select the speakers to be invited.

Walter Kaegi of the University of Chicago deserves credit as the person who initially conceived of the idea and played a key role in planning the initial conference. I was asked to serve as co-chair that first year and as local arrangements chairman in Cleveland, even though I had no university affiliation and had to arrange for the conference to be held it the Cleveland Museum of Art. Walter and I also chaired the program committee. In 1975 there were of course no funds upon which to draw, so the first conference was a real bare-bones, shoestring affair. The registration fee was $7.00, including abstracts, and the motel rooms cost $17.00 for a double. The conference lasted two days, and forty papers were delivered. We hoped that perhaps 75 people would come; to our amazement, about 120 registered. The inaugural banquet of home-cooked Greek food was provided free of charge through the extraordinary generosity of the women of the cathedral of Ss. Constantine and Helen.

In any case we were persuaded that there was a need for such a conference, and steps were taken for the organization of a permanent annual forum. David Wright played a prominent role in drafting the constitution which has served as well to this day. A pattern was established of moving the conference each year to a different university or college campus, or occasionally a museum, normally alternating between venues on the East Coast and in the Middle West. We have met once in Canada, but never on the West Coast, much to the dismay of our colleagues in California, Oregon and Washington. An elected governing board of sixteen scholars decides on policy and chooses the location of each conference and the program chair. We have resolutely remained a conference, and not an association, despite periodic attempts to expand the BSC mandate.

From many points of view the conference has achieved its original goals, of serving as a forum for ongoing. Research in Byzantine Studies in Canada and the United States, and of welcoming participation by scholars at all phases of their careers. The conference continues to grow, suggesting an increasing interest in the discipline of Byzantine studies. From a low of 40 papers in 1975, the inaugural year, the BSC has expanded to an all-time high of 117 papers in 1993 at Princeton, with three simultaneous sessions. Normally the number of papers ranges between about 70 and 90. There have been particular efforts to attract graduate students as attendees and speakers, through subsidized registration fees and meals, travel stipends, and the offering of a prize for the best graduate student paper. As a result graduate students now present as many as one-third of the papers. The BSC is an equal opportunity organization in other ways as well, and the participation of women in leadership roles is especially noticeable. Over the past 25 years, thirteen-women and ten men have served as president, and seventeen men and thirteen women have been program chair. In the 1990s women have come to dominate: the presidency has been held by six women and four men, and eight women and two men have chaired the program committee. Another trend has been the increasing participation of scholars from abroad. This year, out of 94 speakers eleven have crossed the Atlantic specifically to attend the conference, coming from such lands as Italy, Greece, Bulgaria and Georgia. One possible negative result of the establishment of the conference has been the increased isolation of the field of Byzantine studies; Byzantinists are now much more likely to attend the BSC than meetings sponsored by the Medieval Academy, the Medieval Institute in Kalamazoo, the AHA or CAA.

A rapid survey of the contents of papers over the past 25 years reveals both certain consistent patterns and some emerging trends, which reflect the profile of the discipline in North America. One phenomenon is the dominance of late antique studies in the programs of the BSC. Papers on topics of the 4th-7th c. have typically composed from 40-50% of the sessions. The other side of the coin is the weakness of late Byzantine studies; the percentages of papers on the l3th-15th c. are usually in the teens or twenties. If we look at the distribution by discipline, the results produce few surprises. Papers on art, architecture and archaeology taken together typically comprise about one-half of the program, with most of the rest divided between history and literature. Although historical topics have been more numerous than those on literature, philology and given the fact that currently only two North American Byzantinists are teaching in the field of literature and philology. Thus the choice of topics for presentation at the BSC suggests that a number of Byzantine philologists are masquerading out of necessity as historians and classicists. Weak areas as far as representation on the program is concerned are theology, liturgy and church history, numismatics and sigillography, history of medicine, and law. Almost entirely absent are any papers on history of science and epigraphy. To a certain extent these percentages accurately reflect the interests of North American Byzantinists, since American researchers in the fields of Byzantine numismatics, sigillography, epigraphy, legal history and history of science can be counted on the figures of one hand. I would argue, however, that there is much greater interest in this country in Byzantine church history and patristics than one would guess from papers presented at the BSC. Certainly if one judges by the numbers of recent dissertations in the field, with 17 on John Chrysostom alone, patristics would seem to be thriving. The answer must be that theologians and historians of religion rarely participate in the BSC, preferring to attend conferences in their own discipline. I should also like to note the emergence of papers in the field of women's studies, beginning in the 1980s, and in applications of computer technology to our field.

On this celebration of the 25th anniversary of the BSC, we can say that it has reached its maturity, and that its basic character is well established. As we enter the 21^st century let us hope that the conference will continue to be responsive to new trends in scholarship and indeed to take the initiative in pointing out new directions for our discipline. 

Session I: Plenary Session

Chair: Kathleen Corrigan (Dartmouth College)

Panel Paintings of Late Antiquity: A Preliminary Report on the Project

The search for the origin of icons has generally privileged imperial laurata, the official imperial portraits which have all disappeared, and has consistently bypassed one significant body of surviving paintings namely the Late Antique panel paintings of pagan gods. I have been assembling a corpus of this material, which now amounts to more than two dozen panels, and I have been finding striking resemblances, in construction, composition, and iconography to Christian icons. To see to the technical examination of these precious paintings conservator Norman Muller of the Art Museum of Princeton University has joined the project. We hope eventually to examine all aspects of the panels from physical construction to iconography and use. I would like to present some very preliminary findings in this session.

Principally from Egypt, many of these panel paintings are now dispersed in collections in Europe and America. They are generally assigned dates from the late second to the early fourth century, they range in size from 24 cm. to 62 cm. high, and some include their original frames. They are all executed in tempera, sometimes on a very thin coat of gesso. A surprisingly large percentage--about half--are wing panels of triptychs, while about a third of Christian icons before the 9th century are triptychs. One was equipped with a sliding lid, a feature also familiar in Christian icons. Like the figures in Christian icons (and unlike the better known Fayum mummy masks), the gods appear full-length or half-length, standing or enthroned, singly or in groups. They are generally strictly frontal, staring at the viewer, and haloed. Isis, Serapis, Harpocrates, Arcs and Aphrodite are recognized, along with Heron and other anonymous soldier gods, some in Syrian costume.

Of the five that have precise archaeological context, four come from a domestic situation. Significantly the four earliest attestations of Christian use of icons (Irenaeus; the Acts of John, Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica and Epist. ad Constantinam) locate Christian icon cult within the home and link it to a parallel pagan practice. I propose Christian icons took root in an un-official popular realm where they were continuous with pagan antecedents which they gradually replaced.

The ancient and medieval city of Amorium (the Modern village of Hisarkšy) lies 1 km east of Emirdag and approximately 180 km south-east of Ankara in central Turkey. Excavations started under the auspices of the University of Oxford, England in 1988, directed first by Prof. R. Martin Harrison (1998-1992) and more recently by Dr. Chris Lightfoot (1993-1998).

Amorium was an important provincial city in Roman Asia (from 133 B.C. onwards) close to the border with Galatia. It gained greater importance after the founding of Constantinople in 330 as a strategic point on the main route across Asia Minor from the capital to the Syrian frontier and the Holy Land. In the late seventh century it became the capital of the Byzantine theme of Anatolikon and the headquarters of the army of the Anatolics; it was frequently regarded by ninth-century Arab sources as the largest Byzantine city in Anatolia. Frequently attacked by Arabs in the seventh through ninth centuries, it fathered the Amorium dynasty of emperors (820-867). The sack of Amorium in 838, recorded in both Byzantine and Arab literature, was regarded as such a humiliation for the emperor Theophilus that it may have contributed in no small way to the restoration of icons in 843. Despite the claim that after the sack of 838 the city never fully recovered (cf. W. Treadgold, A History of Byzantine State and Society, Stanford 1997, p.573), excavations have shown that Amorium remained a large and prosperous settlement until the late eleventh century.

Work has concentrated on medieval occupation layers with the aim of investigating the nature, extent and layout of the city and tracing changes in the settlement pattern. A secondary objective has been to uncover evidence of the city's turbulent history, and most especially, for the events of 838. At the same time it has been recognized that the site preserves a unique record of the material culture of the Middle Byzantine period.

Areas excavated so far include: (1). A section of the Lower City fortifications, constructed in the late fifth/early sixth century and destroyed during capture of the city in 838. (2). The Lower City Church, an aisled basilica with a similar history to the fortifications, but completely rebuilt as a domed basilica in the late ninth century, and in use until the late eleventh century. The building was embellished with a fine opus sectile marble pavement, painted frescoes on the walls, glass mosaics in vaults and domes, and carved marble furnishings. (3). The Upper City mound, where trenches on the south and north sides have revealed evidence of Middle Byzantine occupation within a circuit wall. Occupation of this man-made mound probably stretches back to the Early Bronze Age (third millennium B.C.), but it has also provided evidence for Seljuk and Ottoman occupation (thirteenth-eighteenth century). (4). New excavations started in a central area of the Lower City, called the Enclosure, in 1996; these were extended during the 1998 season, revealing substantial traces of Byzantine occupation in the seventh-eleventh centuries.

In 1975, the BSC was born, at a time when the study of Byzantine literature as a European literature was very much in its infancy, and a young lecturer moved to take up a position in Belfast, having completed a first draft of a dissertation on the letter-collection of Theophylact of Ochrid and believing confidently that it would be possible to move on to look at other literary texts of the period. Twenty-five years later, the BSC is one of the established fora of the international Byzantine world, the study of Byzantine literature has matured almost unrecognisably -- and I am still being asked to talk and write about the letter-collection of Theophylact of Ochrid, though I still hope some day to move on to other literary texts. I should like to look at these twenty-five years in the light of these three themes: the achievements of the BSC and of its members in the field of Byzantine literary studies, the evolution of my understanding of Theophylact's letter-collection in the context of developments both inside and outside Byzantine Studies, and what is now a continuing debate about how and why we should approach that body of privileged texts which is Byzantine literature. I shall look at issues of epistolarity, genre, reception, literacy, personal relationships, networks, identity and gender, at the contributions of social anthropology, literary theory, art history, film criticism, feminism and queer theory, and at what will appear to later historians as the major development of the period the increasing use of computers. I shall note the achievements of American literary scholars in small ways (the teaching of Byzantine literature, literature surveys, listings of translations) and in big projects (Psellos, Hagiography, Byzantine Monastic Foundation Documents) as well as the individual contributions of great American Byzantinists.

And I shall look at the future of Byzantine literature. We take as a given the need to continue to edit Byzantine texts: why otherwise would we elect to work in a field where there is still so much to do? But what form should these editions take, and what tools shall we need to provide for the students and scholars of the next millennium? We also accept that there is an imperative to bring our texts before a wider audience, and there is every opportunity: Byzantine literature is the only European literature still virgin territory for postmodern critics, entirely innocent of New Critical approaches. We can develop reading strategies which will bring this body of text before the most theoretically advanced textual communities in the world. But what are the most productive ways to do this? And is there really any conflict about the right way to go - or are we all eclecticists now? That debates flourish in Dialogos, The Journal of Early Christian Studies, Symbolae Osloenses and elsewhere may suggest that we feel at least there ought to be debate, though I suspect differences are less fundamental than the debaters believe. With these assessed we can then look forward to the next twenty-five years, of the BSC, of Byzantine literature -- and to other Byzantine texts.

Session II: Pioneers of Byzantine Studies in America

Chair. John Barker (University of Wisconsin)

Born in Constantinople under the Ottoman Sultanate, Sirarpie Der Nersessian (1896-1989) died in Paris after a long, rich, and cosmopolitan career. By background, she was connected to one of the most important families of the Armenian community in Constantinople. Her studies, teaching, lecturing, and her researches developed into a truly international career, involving her with leading scholarly centers and personalities in both Europe and America.

It is upon her years in the United States that attention will be focused in particular. Through her teaching in Wellesley and her long residence at Dumbarton Oaks, she became a major figure in the development of Armenian studies in this country as well as abroad. As a teacher she took a warm interest in her students, and became a supportive and nurturing mentor to younger specialists entering the field. At Dumbarton Oaks, where she served two terms as Acting Director of Studies during her residence, she was a significant intellectual force in its faculty, while she and her sister, Araxie, were beloved members of its community. In her scholarly activities there, too, she played an important role in furthering work in Byzantine art history, whose relationship to the Armenian field she brought into new appreciation. To both of those fields, she contributed an important corpus of seminal scholarly publications.

Though an intensely private person, she was nevertheless warm and affectionate in her friendships and cordial in all her contacts, both professional and social. Those who knew or worked with her will always cherish her memory fondly.

Robert P, Blake's search for Byzantium became focused in Russia at the suggestion of Professor Eduard Meyer, University of Berlin, in 1910 where Robert had gone as a John Harvard Traveling Fellow in Classics. Armed with a general letter of introduction from President Taft he went to St. Petersburg where he was impressed by the Faculty of Oriental Languages at the Imperial University. He returned to Russia in 1911 for his second year as a John Harvard Traveling Fellow in Classics and History and studied history with Professor Rostovsteff.

After a short time as an instructor at the University of Pennsylvania he returned to Russia in 1914. Robert began his study of Oriental languages--Arabic, Syriac, Armenian and Georgian, returning to the United States in 1916 to take his Ph.D. examination at Harvard. Three months later he was back in Russia. He took his degree of Magistrant in 1918, which allowed him to teach at the Russian universities. In 1918 he was sent to the Caucasus to update the conflicting catalogues of the Tiflis manuscripts and then to investigate various texts of the Bible. He became a Professor of the State University of Georgia when it was founded.

In 1920 he received an appointment from Harvard, which began his career there.

As a result of the insight, contacts, energies and connections of Robert Pierpont Blake several major efforts to preserve and promote Byzantine history were advanced.

First, in Tiflis in 1919-1920 he met Thomas Whittemore and a decade later worked with him to establish The Byzantine Institute. Thomas Whittemore, with the backing of The Byzantine Institute Directors, convinced Mustapha Kemal Ataturk that the Christian mosaic in the Church of Holy Wisdom should be revealed. Both Blake, as President, and Whittemore, as Director of the Institute, died within a month of each other in 1950 and eventually The Byzantine Institute was folded into Dumbarton Oaks.

Robert P. Blake was instrumental in the early discussions with Mildred and Robert Bliss for the donation of Dumbarton Oaks and its endowment to Harvard University. Robert served as Senior Scholar there in 1942.

The third major spin off from the search for Byzantium was the Harvard Yenching Institute. In 1910, while at the University at St Petersburg, Robert had been impressed that all the languages of the Near East and major languages of the Far East were taught. He felt that Harvard should offer a spectrum of the major languages of the Far East. This opportunity was created by his 1928 appointment as one of the first Trustees for life of what was to be the Harvard Yenching Institute.

Whittemore's work in Istanbul is well known, but the man isn't, chiefly because of his habitual secrecy and a not inconsiderable academic skepticism. His background and objectives are reviewed in this brief, informal talk.

He graduated at Tufts, taught there, then spent several years at Coptic sites excavating with the Egypt Exploration Society; frescoes in particular attracted him. In 1916 he organised a committee to fund the covert emigration of Russian youths and their subsequent education in the west, a successful fifteen-year venture. In the late 1920s he taught at N.Y.U. and in 1930 created The Byzantine Institute (he was its Director until his death), a Massachusetts charitable corporation; generous contributors to the Russian program stayed with him. He planned a research library, a publications program and, above all, hands-on work in Istanbul. In 1932 he secured, face to face, AtatŸrk's permission to work in the Ayasofia, a great coup; the grant was later extended to other Istanbul buildings. Work began immediately. Upon Whittemore's death in 1950 Paul Underwood, assisted by Ernest Hawkins, who had been Whittemore's lieutenant, took over. In 1953-1954 the Institute was quietly absorbed by Dumbarton Oaks.

Whittemore's deeply held High Church convictions and aesthetic values, as well as considerable powers of explanation and persuasion, underlie his success. He was an aesthete with an iron will, short with the common herd, courtly and fraternal with the rich and powerful. At once pensive, abstemious, mysterious, and elegant, he managed to be, for some, a romantic crusader for Byzantine art. In some ways a poseur, he was nevertheless highly practical, and brought to his scaffolding new procedures, though his assistants there and elsewhere were not always granted proper credit; that, together with his somewhat sparse scholarship, kindled much criticism. But his work in the Ayasofia and the Kariye Camii survives to record his ambition and determination; others interpret, but he revealed the evidence.

Session III: Death, Demons & Deviants

Chair Henry Maguire (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

For the Byzantines the tomb was a place not only for personal piety and sentiment; the tomb sheltered the "sleeping" body awaiting the physical Resurrection, and was the focus of intercessions on behalf of the deceased. In this context, it was popularly believed to be crucial that this resting place should remain undisturbed. The desecration of tombs and their contents was therefore regarded by civil lawmakers and church canonists with horror, as a sacrilege almost beyond comprehension. Tombs were protected by law against grave-robbing, which was condemned as a capital and spiritual crime. Grave- robbing was therefore regarded by Byzantine authors as one of the most grotesque crimes committed by the Latin armies that sacked Thessaloniki in 1185, and Constantinople in 1204. Grave robbing also followed in the wake of the Turkish conquests, and was associated with ungodly barbarism.

Despite the association by Byzantine authors of grave robbing with the enemies of Byzantium, grave robbing is attested in Byzantine society, both by documented cases and by legal measures. Grave-robbing in Byzantium is deserving of study for it offers insights on how Byzantines viewed the profane corpse and its resting place, and in particular, the exposure or handling of decomposing human remains. Grave robbing therefore provides a useful counterpoint to Byzantine veneration of the incorruptible, saintly corpse, and allows us to explore the often thin dividing line between what was considered grave-robbing and the translation of relics.

This paper will discuss the phenomenon of grave-robbing in Byzantium from the Ninth through the Fourteenth Centuries, bringing together evidence from civil and canon law, historical testimonia, epitaphs, and archaeological materials. Legal definitions and penalties in and penalties in civil and canon law will be discussed, assessing the official position of State and Church. This will be compared against the popular perception of grave-robbing, as attested by historical testimonia and other: non-institutional sources, concerning the causes and consequences of grave-robbing. Using these legal precedents and documented cases, this paper will determine which individuals and groups were found guilty of grave-robbing in Byzantium, and the nature of their illicit activities. These cases also offer insights on the effectiveness of laws in discouraging grave-robbing, and on the wide-ranging motives for breaking these laws.

Byzantine attitudes to the profane body revealed by descriptions of grave- robbing, and the perceived risks to public hygiene and mores, will also be explored. Such accounts offer important evidence of popular folklore concerning supernatural intervention and divine retribution. This conceptual background will be discussed in the context of inter-linked notions of physical and spiritual pollution brought about by contact with "the unfortunate dead" (Christopher of Mitylene, On the Buried Dead, ed. Kurtz [Leipzig- 1903] No.82).

Byzantine canonical legislation often deals with satanic influences and demonic activity. This brief study will reproduce the historical and theological framework in which the discussion of female vampires or giloudai takes place in the canonical answers attributed to Ioasaph (d. 1437), the metropolitan of Ephesos. The author's canonical discussion represents one of the few such treatments in Byzantine canon law. The role is restricted to women, and the victims to infants.

In contrast to images of motherhood, the giloudai are portrayed as taking, rather than contributing blood to children, whom they destroy, rather than birth. This brief examination will attempt to show the historical, medical, and theological precedents to the author's discussion as well as parallel legislation on female vampires in other canonical works.

Ioasaph is attributed authorship of fifty-seven answers to questions of a certain presbyter, George Drazinos, apparently resident in Crete. Two manuscripts of the work have been published in rare Russian and Greek editions (1903 and 1933). One of these manuscripts is dated 1438 by the hand of the copyist. Although the work contains few explicit references to Byzantine legal sources, as a former Great Protosynkellos the author based his responses on an expert knowledge of civil and ecclesiastical law. Unlike other similar questions and responses, the writing gives the appearance of a pastoral work directed towards a clerical audience, but not jurists.

This study will draw general conclusions concerning the author's views on the nature of women, evil, and the reception of the sacred. These conclusions will contribute to a broader understanding of religious life and women in Byzantine society.

Late Antique Levantine amulets exemplify sophisticated and practical semiotic structures that reveal desires and expectations for experience, and semantic differences that portray multiple layers of inter-religious beliefs. A fifth- to sixth-century engraved bronze amulet, from Syria or Palestine and now in the Kelsey Museum at the University of Michigan, displays a rich and fascinating collection of apotropaic symbols, images, and words of "pagan," Jewish, Christian, and pan-Levantine character, as do numerous similar Late Antique amulets, that are often modest in material or workmanship, but that are challenging and multi-faceted as historical documents for late antique spiritual practices. Late Antique texts tell us that amulets offered eastern Mediterranean people, with limited resources, recourse for addressing the problems of everyday life, including healing, protection from the evil eye and various demons and ailments, protection in childbirth, curses, and love spells. Never in doubt about the affects of magic, Christian church authorities argued against the use of magical tools however potent. These amulets of ritual power display words and images in heterodox combinations, thus we encounter various Iaos, Osirises, and Christs populating ritual practices, and in this regard we can speak "Christianities" in the plural and in conjunction with other seemingly distinct religions. The amulets exploit such a multiplication of referents in order to generate Power (powerful utterances, powerful images, powerful affects) for the people who used them. For instance, the signs of alpha and omega appear on liturgical silver as an abbreviation for Christ as the beginning and the end of Creation, in Egyptian papyrus inscriptions as powerful signs that bind various demons, and as punctuation to signify the beginning and end of a spell written on a broken clay pot, depending upon shifting contexts and interpretations. The more the multiple and shifting referents for single signifiers, then the closer that signifier comes to being a simulacrum, that is, its own referent, that encapsulates and suggests various other referents -- a sign of signification itself. This semiotic mechanism -- the generation of simulacra -- makes signs into objects for manipulation, and renders numerous amulets socially powerful and psychologically efficacious. These objects offer a model for the multiple and shifting semiotic schemes of Late Antiquity and provide examples of unorthodox though common spiritual practices.

Among the concerns that this paper will address are: the iconography and social contexts of Late Antique Levantine amulets, their psychological and semantic motivations, Early Byzantine models for desire and expectations for experience, the recent reevaluation of the complex term "pagan" as well as the reformulating of the term "magic" as "ritual practice" and various problems of Christian bias in Modern scholarship. In addition, it will suggest that the Late Antique ideas concerning the power of images along with the possibility of simulacra that these amulets embody also describe a pre-history for the Byzantine theory of holy icons that was developed a few centuries later during the Iconoclast Controversy.

Session IV: In Honor of Seka Allen

Chair: John V. A. Fine, Jr. (University of Michigan)

Byzantine or Romanesque? The Question of Style in Medieval Ecclesiastical Architecture of Serbia

A great variety of stylistic modes witnessed in medieval ecclesiastical architecture of Serbia has long been recognized, and various explanations of this phenomenon have been proposed. None of these explanations have addressed the central question: how such a variety was possible considering the fact did the Serbian Church was an Orthodox church and that frescoes used in the interiors of the same church buildings showed a consistent and exclusive adherence to the Byzantine artistic tradition.

This paper will argue that the style of church buildings in the context of the Serbian Orthodox Church, unlike the interior decoration of the same churches, was not governed by the prerogatives of the Church as the user of these buildings. The choice, it would seem, was left to the patrons or the builders of individual buildings. Likewise, it would appear that the individual patrons strove to get the best available builders at any given moment, regardless of their ethnic or religious origins. As builders often came from culturally different parts of the Balkans, the style of church buildings differed accordingly.

The paper will examine a number of specific cues of patronage with very interesting results as far as the style of building is concerned. The architecture of monastery churches of Studenica, Sopocani, Gradac, Arilje, Gracanica, Banjska and Decani will be explored. Each of these cases will consider the idiosyncratic circumstances that appear to have governed the ultimate choice of architectural style. Collectively, these demonstrate that the choice of architectural style--unlike that of the interior frescoes in the same churches--was completely free of any constraints that may have been imposed by the Church authorities as the principal users of the buildings in question. Ultimately, the lessons of this paper may shed light on some broader developments in Byzantine architecture where diverse stylistic elements associated with foreign architectural traditions (Islamic, Western) often appear alongside the genuinely Byzantine aspects. This may permit us to conceptualize different areas and levels of input of individual patrons in shaping different aspects of a given cultural tradition.

Questions of Intent and Interpretation in Sixth-Century Balkan Floor Mosaics

The study of meaning in early Byzantine floor mosaics is complicated by the very nature of the medium. Images that could be walked on had a different function than images illustrating the text of a book or adorning an apse vault. Recent studies of symbolism in floor mosaics have focused on the relationship between the texts of sermons and images on floors (H. Maguire) or liturgical context and meaning (Donceel-Vožte). Both approaches have yielded important insights, but have limitations. The sermons are sometimes centuries removed from the mosaic floors and evidence for liturgical practices from specific times and places is scarce. This paper will approach the issue by considering the historical circumstances in which elaborate imagery on the floors of churches developed from 450 to 550, and the process by which the floors were designed, using examples from Stobi, Delphi, Tegea, Heraclea Lyncestis, and Nikopolis.

Imagery on church floors was, with few exceptions, restricted to subjects from the natural world, but even this limited vocabulary was not used consistently. After an initial period of exuberant decoration in the fourth century, most floors of the early fifth century in the eastern Mediterranean had austere geometric ornament. From the middle of the fifth century, however, floor mosaics became ever more ambitious incorporating a profusion of images from nature. During this period, Christian basilicas were built and decorated at an extraordinary pace. The surviving remains show that these churches were lavish, if not gaudy, products of a prosperous provincial culture, in which church building was a manifestation of civic pride and a matter of prestige for ambitious local bishops.

Such patrons demanded colorful floor mosaics with a wide variety of flora and fauna often combined with complex ornamental patterns. In response mosaicists enhanced relatively simple compositions by adding more figures and also turned to sources from other media such as "scientific" illustrations or wall decoration. The mosaics under consideration show a range of approaches. At Stobi the narthex mosaic includes a rich assemblage of images and patterns organized in a grid. In the nave and narthex at Delphi images of birds, land animals and water creatures are sorted into different sections of the mosaic. The Tegea mosaic uses personifications of months and rivers of paradise. In the Heraclea narthex a garden painting is adapted to the floor. At Nikopolis the topographic meaning of a landscape image is made explicit by an inscription.

The patrons' desires for rich effects and the craftsmen's methods should be considered when interpreting floor mosaics of this period. While most can be generally identified as terrestrial creation, coherent symbolic constructs are the exception rather than the norm. At Nikopolis an inscription identifies the frame of water creatures as ocean, but one cannot automatically assume the same meaning at Tegea and Heraclea. The symmetrical composition in the center of the Heraclea mosaic probably carries more significance than others placed within patterns at Stobi and Delphi. At Delphi the central placement of an animal combat scene used elsewhere in less prominent locations remains ambiguous.

Stefan Dusan of Serbia conquered Eastern Macedonia in 1344-1345. The entire region, including Mount Athos and its hinterland with numerous monastic properties, remained an integral part of the Serbian Empire until the battle of the Marica in September of 1371. Athonite archives contain a number of documents; many of them issued immediately after the Byzantine reconquest in 1371, concerning land disputed between the local archonts and Athonite monasteries.

Contrary to the commonly held opinion it seems that the Serbian tsar did not change the existing administrative system in traditional Byzantine regions of his Greco-Serbian Empire. Many among the local Byzantine aristocracy accepted the new ruler, as the monks and protos of Mount Athos immediately did, and in reward not only kept their property but also received new ranks and new estates. Without their support Stefan Dusan could not have annexed large portions of Byzantine territories without having fought a single battle.

A number of local Byzantine landowners opted to remain loyal to John V Palaeologos or John VI Kantakouzenos and fled the region before Stefan Dusan. Their property was confiscated and handed over to either Athonite monasteries or those local noblemen who recognized the new ruler.

In the fall of 1371 the despot Manuel Palaeologos, the governor of Thessalonika, liberated many towns from the "Serbian yoke" and made it possible for "justice to shine and for the Mighty and Holy Lord and Emperor to assume the reign he had been deprived of." However, the rhetoric of the chrysobull was not matched by great changes in land distribution. The documents issued by Serbian authorities remained legally valid after 1371. Monasteries and many among the local dignitaries kept their property. The Byzantines who had left the region before the Serbs were in the worst position. Many of them could not retrieve their lands, which had been given to monasteries during the period of Serbian rule. However, the extant documents do not express just the bitterness and resentment of Serbian rule on the part of those who had lost their property and whose legal rights had been disrespected; some are full of gratitude and respect "towards the late, Holy Emperor Stephen [Dusan]" and "the devout Lady, the Empress [Helen of Serbia]." Kyr Doukas Koreses, for example, joined Stefan Dusan in the fall of 1345, kept his properties, and joined the ranks of the tsar's courtiers. In the autumn of 1371 he was once again in the service of the Byzantine emperor and, once again, he kept his property. Such an attitude was obviously much more profitable than loyalty to the party which lost.

The 26 years of Serbian rule were a period of arrested economic development for those among the local landowners who remained loyal to the emperor in Constantinople. At the same time, they proved very beneficial for the economic and political power of those who had a more flexible perception of political loyalty. Having annexed Byzantine territories, Stefan Dusan acted as one of the sides in the incessant Byzantine civil wars: he was obviously accepted as such by many of the local magnates exhausted by decades of civil strife and tired of ever shifting political alliances.

This paper is submitted in fond memory of Seka Allen, and in grateful recognition of her undying interest in considering any evidence for expanding our knowledge of life in the Byzantine world, during all the years of her active and devoted association with Dumbarton Oaks. The choice of evidence from textiles honors the sharp and critical eye with which she found and rescued find Asian carpets hidden in unlikely places like Urbana, Illinois; and the feline subject honors her affection for cats.

The use of cheetahs for hunting in, the middle-Byzantine period parallels the prestigious practice of equestrian falconry as a mark of high status not only in the Empire itself, but as a cross-cultural phenomenon stretching from Asia to Western Europe. We can point to tame cheetahs in a variety of eleventh and twelfth century depictions, Byzantine and Iranian. A cheetah on a red leash is set free to chase a stag above a richly-decorated eleventh-century canon table, opposite a scene of a falcon with its master. Cheetahs observed in domestic relaxation lend their charm to painted initials in a twelfth-century manuscript; and on the carved ivory of the presumably South Italian Clephane horn, a demonstration of equestrian hunting with cheetahs takes place in the Constantinople hippodrome. Three-dimensional glazed ceramic figures of riders with cheetahs similarly mounted behind them survive from Seljuk Iran.

Although at the present time we lack a securely-dated sequence of textiles to document an unbroken series of cheetahs from the early Byzantine period into the Comnenian, there is evidence in textile images that tame cheetahs were esteemed and used in much the same way centuries earlier than these middle-Byzantine depictions. Close inspection of the rich animal imagery of the Horse and Lion tapestry at Dumbarton Oaks suggests that the hunting cheetah may already have been a prestigious animal in the sixth century. A closely-related tapestry in the Cleveland Museum depicts the parading of cheetahs on leashes by trainers in Persian dress. The apparently Persian imagery linking these two tapestries hints that the tame cheetah was known as a sign of imported luxury.

Small-scale textiles from the early Byzantine period provide further hints of the exotic status of the tame cheetah. One tapestry-woven scene, probably cut from a luxurious tunic found in an Egyptian burial, and now in a Swiss collection, represents the bringing in homage by trainers in Persian dress, of a pair of large spotted cats, in harness and on leashes. The animals are offered along with covered pyxes to a ruler throned under the arches of a ceremonial entrance. From the assumption that the scene is Bacchic has followed an identification of the cats as panthers, brought to celebrate the god's conquest of Asia. If, however, cheetahs were actually tamed and presented as courtly gifts by the time this fine weaving was made, perhaps as early as the fourth or fifth century, they would have been the likely models for the felines in such a scene.

Three textiles in another recently published collection exhibited at Krannert Art Museum and scheduled to be shown at Harvard in honor of the Byzantine Studies Conference there in the year 2000, also appear to represent tame cheetahs. The earliest example may date to the fifth or sixth century, the second to the seventh or eighth, while the third, with cheetahs mounted behind riding hunters in the presence of a falconer, seems to be more medieval in its abstraction. Their tentative chronology aside, these textiles represent three different aspects of the cheetah: its alien but powerful presence, in relation to familiar and more realistically rendered aquatic birds; its hunting prowess, in a vignette inserted into a design representing a paradisal garden; and its remarkable ability to sit behind the saddle of a moving horse. The presence of these animals on garments or saddle accessories, like scenes of falconry on silks, implies that their later Byzantine appearance in texts and painted or ceramic images is either a conscious revival of an earlier fashion or a continuation of a practice whose early history has been lost to us.

A Contribution toward Identifying Some of the Figures in the Five Domes of the Virgin Ljeviska in Prizren

To insure the proper identification of individual figures, Byzantine masters followed well established iconographic traditions and used accompanying explanatory inscriptions. When such identifying texts are lost, the subject of each composition can easily be recognized by other means. As far as individual figures are concerned, traditional head types or occasional attributes might help with identification. In spite of these iconographic factors, the icon and the attribute, many saints whose name inscriptions are lost remain anonymous in Byzantine painting. Such is the case with a number of standing figures in the Cathedral of the Virgin Ljeviska painted soon after the completion of its renovation in 1307, under the ktitorship of King Milutin. These figures are depicted in the lowest as well as in the highest zone of this church.

Although from multiple points of view in a monographic study by Gordana Babic, the much damaged frescoes in all five domes and drum did not receive the lengthy analysis needed for possible identification and a contextual interpretation of all the figures painted there. Most of the images under consideration have lost their name inscriptions, and most of the texts inscribed on the scrolls that some of them carry survive only in fragments. Additionally, all of the fresco surfaces suffered extensive damage, especially in the areas depicting the head and upper torso of the figures.

Because of their place within the iconographic program of the Virgin Ljeviska and their location in the drums of the domes, the figures are identified by Babic as belonging to the general iconographic category of the prophets. This categorization seems to be further strengthened by the fact that twenty-two of the total twenty-four figures wear classical-type garments. Furthermore, body language, hand gestures, and scrolls (either rolled or opened) seem to confirm this rather generalized iconographic grouping. All these impressions are strengthened by the use of the epithet "prophet" inscribed above the right shoulder of each figure.

In this paper, attention will be directed toward identification of the above-mentioned figures and their texts through a comparative iconographic, textual, and statistical analysis with earlier or near contemporary monuments in which Old Testament authors and other characters are positively identified, and where they occur in a comparable number. Although all the surviving epithets refer to the corresponding figures as "prophets" some of the surviving names surprisingly belie that identification, revealing an unexpected mixture of authors of the Biblical prophet books, other characters who are commonly called prophets (e.g., Elijah and Elisha), and others who were never labeled as such, to the best of the author's knowledge (e.g., Gad, Asher, Zebulun, etc., who, for example, are represented in the south dome of the esonarthex of Kariye Camii). A prototype for the decoration of the domes of the Virgin Ljeviska is not found among the preserved monuments. The formal solution of the main dome of the Virgin Ljeviska is reflected in such churches as Staro Nagoricino. (ca. 1318) and the Virgin Hodegetria at Pec (before 1337), but the entire iconographic program of the five domes has never been duplicated, and in that fact lies its unique significance.

Session V. Ecclesiastical Politics

Chair: Michael Maas (Rice University)

Over nine hundred years ago, the Christian Church was cleaved in two by the mutual excommunications of the pope and the patriarch of Constantinople. The historical issues and events surrounding this schism in the Church have been the subject of numerous studies which have exhaustively reviewed the political origins of this debate. From this mass of research, one controversial practice presents itself as enticingly unusual: the use of leavened or unleavened bread for the eucharist. For many historians, this bone of contention occupies a significantly subordinate role in comparison to the greater issues of the Filioque and papal supremacy. This opinion, however, betrays the lack of scholarly attention of historians to the intensely important role that the eucharist played in the Byzantine Church and the lives of its members. While the question of adding the Filioque to the Nicene Creed was of dogmatic importance to the Byzantine parishioner, it was the visual and tangible leavened eucharistic bread, which captured the minds and hearts of the Byzantines when considering the question of reunion with the Latin Church.

The aim of this paper is to contextualize the azyma controversy within the larger framework of the political and liturgical developments of the Byzantine and Latin worlds. By the end of the first Christian millennium, both the political and religious institutions of the Byzantine east and Latin west had undergone a dramatic transformation which manifested itself in artistic, architectural, and liturgical symbolism. It is the effect of this symbolism on the Byzantine clergy and congregations which helps to explain the original schism of the Christian Church and its failure to reunite after the irenic Councils of Lyon and Ferrara/Florence. As will be seen, developments in the eucharistic rite in the early Middle Ages elevate the importance of the issue of the eucharist to at least equal status with the Filioque question; for the substitution of unleavened bread in the Byzantine rite would have completely transformed the liturgy of the eastern Church and robbed the Byzantines of an essential element of their identity.

The first interest of historians being generally to recover "historical reality" through the most reliable records, it is probably not surprising that little attention is paid to inauthentic records. In the absence of all but a few quotations from the original Greek acts of Constantinople II the long Latin version published in Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum quite properly commands our attention if reliable records of the events of the council itself are indeed our interest. Inauthentic records, though, have a special interest of their own, revealing, as they often do, the quite different historical reality behind the foisting upon some intended audience of a "forged" image of the past. Such is the case with the now-neglected short Latin version of the acts of Constantinople II: passage-by-passage comparison of the two versions reveals the many ways in which the perpetrators of the "forgery" subtly, and not so subtly, re-presented and mis-represented this very problematic council to the Latin-speaking world. The intentional glossing over of Vigilius' opposition during the council is only the most glaring of many examples of this technique. What emerges from this study of the "forgers'" transformations of the record is the conviction that Justinian's circle of advisers very astutely calculated what might make the council acceptable to the West, and construed the council to meet those criteria. This is so despite the fact that other accounts, perhaps the longer version itself, could not be completely suppressed, and in the event the feared schism was not, as had been hoped, entirely avoided.

Ecclesiastical histories and church council acts of the fourth and fifth centuries contain numerous accounts of bishops put on trial for a colorful variety of offenses. These "high crimes and misdemeanors" included heresy, misappropriation of church funds, excessive luxury, adultery, violence, and even murder and sorcery, and involved famous individuals such as Athanasius (for the notorious "hand of Arsenius"), John Chrysostom, Theophilus of Alexandria, Ibas of Edessa and Dioscorus of Alexandria. These charges have frequently been dismissed as politically motivated, biased, exaggerated or downright invented, and many of them probably were. But their evidentiary value is not limited to a simple question of their truth of falsehood in specific cases. Accusations against bishops are far more important for what they can tell us about the audience to which they were addressed. Polemical charges whether true or false--offer us a window into the expectations and values that governed Christian thought on the exercise of power, by showing the ways in which people imagined. an unscrupulous bishop might abuse his authority.

The conversion of Constantine led not so much to dominance of the emperor over the church--traditionally called "Caesaropapism"--but rather to the assumption by powerful bishops of various aspects of secular power: economic, administrative, judicial and even, on occasion, military. With such power inevitably came worries as to how that power might be used and abused. The charges allow us to study the rhetorical construction of the "tyrant bishop"--opposite of the idealized bishop/saint of hagiography. The polemical stereotype of the tyrant-bishop embodied both abuse of power, and corruption by power. It drew heavily upon secular political discourse and its classical models of "bad" emperors, tyrants and usurpers.

The tyrant-bishop distinguished himself by his greed, love of luxury and ostentation, which drove him to squander church resources intended for the poor. To satisfy his lust for power, he eagerly sought and sometimes stole ordination, and continually overstepped the legitimate bounds of his canonical authority. The tyrant-bishop, moved by anger and jealousy rather than concern for the faith, used doctrinal controversy as a means of pursuing personal vendettas, and frequently employed violence against critics and rivals. One of the most powerful polemical images featured the tyrant-bishop who surrounded himself with soldiers and imitated the trappings of a secular magistrate, emblematic of his desire to hold worldly power as well as spiritual authority. This discourse of episcopal misconduct allows us to examine the larger issue of how Christians sought to problematize the exercise of power within the church in the post-Constantinian era.

The schism of 1054 hardly appears in eleventh-century Greek texts--a point which every scholar who writes about it feels obliged to make. Michael Keroularios' contemporaries seem to have seen his quarrel as primarily personal and his complaints about the Roman Church as intemperate. The dispute between the papal legates and the Patriarch did, however, become central in later Byzantine accounts of how Rome and Constantinople came to be divided from one another. Those later accounts tend to portray Keroularios as a defender of the Orthodox faith against the schismatic (or maybe heretical) Latins--a heroic position which he has occupied, in some historical narratives, down to the present. Modern historians have not always acknowledged the possibly distorting affect of using these later accounts to understand what happened in 1054. In contrast, distortion of a different sort has resulted from relying too heavily on the reports of Keroularios' western antagonist, Humbert of Silva Candida. Historians who proceed in this way tend to see Keroularias as a villain, dividing the churches because of his own arrogant and combative personality.

This paper assumes that the question of whether Keroularios was a hero or a villain is unanswerable. For historians of Byzantium, it is important, instead, to identify which individuals and groups in the Byzantine Orthodox Church adopted him as a hero and when. Using published and unpublished accounts of the schism from different decades, this paper will trace the evolution of the heroic view of Keroularios, arguing that he is adopted as a hero of Orthodoxy only in the twelfth century, and then for reasons specific to the period and by writers who have their own anti-Latin agenda.

In a broad sense, the various Byzantine portraits of Keroularios highlight differences of opinion and changes of opinion within the Constantinopolitan church. Definitions of orthodoxy and heresy led always to disagreements, and the status of Latins was never entirely clear. Seen from this perspective, the Orthodox response to westerners; looks ambivalent and flexible--far from the monolithic and unchanging picture commonly painted in histories of the schism, be they medieval or modern.

The traditional understanding of the reasons behind Rufinus of Aquileia's writing of a Church History has been the goal of edifying the Aquileian citizenry and distracting them from the Visigothic siege. Additionally, Rufinus is understood to have used the opportunity to advocate ascetic monasticism, and with the help of Chromatius distanced himself from the Origenist controversy. Although this is all that appears in Rufinus' preface, this understanding is too simplistic. Careful attention to Rufinus' narrative, and the definitions and concepts for which it is a vehicle show otherwise. Rufinus' Church History is rather another chapter within the Origenist controversy, as the author uses his narrative subtilely to argue a position on its issues.

Rufinus draws a picture of the fourth century as a struggle between orthodoxy and various manifestations of error, notably Arianism, Judaism, and paganism. He thereby defines error by several consistent attributes. Error concerns deviations in belief, and thus is not identical to religious crime. Manifestations of error have beginnings at the point when they are identified, and adherents during the preceding period should not be implicated or blamed unless they continue such adherence. Error must involve conscious acts of deception, themselves crimes, which fool people into following them. Error can only be identified by a specific process involving human debate, the invocation of God by a holy man, and the unmistakable sign of god's miraculous power as judgment Error holds this form regardless of the doctrine involved. Finally, error as a whole has by the time of Rufinus' composition suffered a severe blow and no longer represents a serious threat to Christianity.

The importance of these attributes of error for Rufinus' place in the Origenist controversy are clear. They allow Rufinus to draw a universe in which condemning Origen or the Origenist monks, at least so long as God remain silent. Rufinus, angry at Jerome's letters and Theophilus' synod, undermines the authority and legitimacy of their arguments by demonstrating what genuine heretics and apostates look like, and why Origen cannot possibly fit this all-or-nothing image. Contrary to the way some have viewed him, Rufinus does not appear in this light to be an Origenist as much as an advocate for an end to witch hunts and to the denigration of church heroes.

For this, the genre of church history serves Rufinus well. It allows him to build a work which operates on many levels, which offers edification and advocates monasticism for a wide audience, while for a certain group it presents a position in this controversy. My claim here is not that Rufinus used a secret code, or that people were necessarily intended to read these attributes of error as principles. Rufinus intimately ties his arguments over Origen to his other more explicit tasks. Yet, the use of a Latin history to argue church politics is neither unexpected nor meaningless. There was an ample audience, literate in Latin, eastern and western, for his views on Origen. The use of history here tells us something of the importance of representing the past to this controversy, something worth further attention.

Session VI: Iconography

Chair Genevra Kornbluth (University of Maryland)

The epigram "Eis ton naon ton Stoudiou" by John Geometres (fl. 959-990) furnishes valuable evidence which has hitherto been overlooked by art historians. The poem gives a detailed ekphrasis of the church of St. John Studios with special attention to the mosaic in the apse. This description is of twofold importance. First, it can be added to the mere handful of texts upon which our view of post-Iconoclastic monumental decoration in Constantinople is based. The other exphraseis that have entered into the art historical discussion, namely the Tenth Homily of Photios and the orations of Leo VI on the Monastery of Kauleas and the church of Stylianos Zaoutzes, describe elements that coalesced in the later tenth and eleventh centuries into the "classical" Middle Byzantine iconographic schema: Christ in the dome, the Theotokos in the apse, the saints on the lower walls, and the life of Christ in the intermediate zone. The mosaic Geometres describes at the Studios, however, presents an entirely different subject, a monumental apocalyptic vision or "liturgical maiestas." The newly adduced textual evidence thus dispels the notion that there was a single general scheme for the decoration of churches in the capital following the defeat of Iconoclasm.

The second contribution of this text is towards our understanding of the so-called "Archaic group" of Cappadocian churches, where the Studios apse finds its closest contemporary parallels. Whereas much of the extant literature on these monuments regards the apocalyptic vision as a backward holdover from Early Byzantine Syria and Egypt, more recent scholarship has suggested closer artistic ties between Cappadocia. and Constantinople, even within the "Archaic group." The epigram on the Studios furnishes evidence for a Constantinopolitan source for this subject, the most salient iconographic feature of these churches. Rather than looking to models already centuries old and long-since cutoff by the Islamic conquests, those who directed the decoration of Cappadocian cave churches seem to have looked to the leading monastery of the empire, that of St. John Studios.

The Triumph of Orthodoxy, the Christological Dispute of 1160-1166, and the Titulus of the Cross in Byzantium

Alfred BŸchler (Berkeley, CA)

In 1990 I showed that subsequent to the restoration of images in 843, the titulus of the Cross, which in all four Gospels includes the appellation 'King of the Jews', is absent in Byzantine representations of the Crucifixion, but that by the end of the twelfth century the title 'King of Glory', HO BASELEUS TES DOXES (hereafter: OBTD) had taken its place. So far no satisfactory explanation of these developments had been advanced. Here I shall argue that the disappearance of the title 'King of the Jews' had its origin in the pervasive iconophile designation of iconoclasts as 'Jews', while the appearance of OBTD was prompted by the dispute of 1160-1166 concerning the Glory of Christ.

Neither patristic exegesis (John Chrysostom, Cyril of Alexandria, the Catenae) nor later Byzantine commentary (Michael Psellos, Theophylakt of Ochrid) supply arguments for the rejection of the titulus. The absence of serious theological reasons is underlined by the appearance of the titulus INBI modelled on the Latins' INRI on sixteenth-century Mount Athos. The specifically Byzantine nature of the elimination of the Evangelists' titulus is shown not only by the continuous practice of the Latin Church, but also by the prevalence of tituli, generally of the form 'This is the King of the Jews', in Syrian and Armenian illuminated manuscripts. The regular Byzantine use of the term 'Jews' in referring to iconoclasts could easily have suggested a reading of HO BASILEUS TON IOUDATON as 'The Basileus of the Iconoclasts', thus blocking its use in representations of Christ on the Cross. Contemporary Byzantine anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism, as displayed in such manuscripts as the Khludov Psalter and the Paris Gregory and in the writings of Photius and Gregory Asbestas, probably played only a secondary role.

From the middle of the twelfth century onward, OBTD appears as the canonical label both of the Cross in scenes of the Passion, and of the icon variously known as Akra Tapeinosis, Imago Pietatis and The Man of Sorrows, for which Belting has proposed an eleventh-century origin. These two uses of OBTD, however, are probably the result of separate developments. Between ca. 500 AD. and the decades around 1100 the inscription 'King of Glory' (from Ps-23) is recorded some four times in association with the Pantocrator and twice with the Crucifixion. These earlier uses, and the various other associations of 'King of Glory' amply account for the appearance of OBTD on the new icon, "neither a timeless portrait nor the narration of an action" (Belting). Discussions of the image have always assumed that the use of OBTD here was based on an earlier and presumably regular association with the Crucifixion. The earliest firmly dated twelfth-century use of it, however, is at Kurbinovo (1191), where it appears both in the Crucifixion and in the Descent from the Cross. Here it has clearly taken on the role of the titulus of the Passion narrative, after a long series of Byzantine crucifixions showing at most a tablet inscribed with the monogram IC XC. I suggest that this development was the result of the christological controversy that agitated Byzantine society between 1160 and 1166 and that was terminated by an edict imposed by Emperor Manuel I Komnenos. The dispute concerned the proper interpretation of John 14:28, 'The Father is greater than I', but it was commonly known as a dispute concerning the Glory (John Kinnamos: doxa; Hugo Eteriano: gloria of Christ. The appearance of OBTD on monumental images of the Passion could have satisfied all sides of the dispute; it may well have been preceded by its use as the tide of the Man of Sorrows.

A new image of the Virgin was introduced on the gold coins of the empresses Zoe and Theodora in 1042. The Mother of God appeared with her hands raised in a gesture of prayer, a medallion was placed on her chest with the blessing Christ Child inside. The image became popular only in the last quarter of the eleventh century when it was re-introduced on the coins of Alexios I Komnenos (1081-1118). To this date there has not been any in-depth study of the origin and meaning of this iconographic type.

The image is often referred to in scholarship under the name of "Episkepsis," meaning "Visitation and Protection." Yet, a number of other names are also associated with this iconographic type such as: Blachernitissa, Panaglotissa, Platytera, and "Znamenie." We will argue that the names describe different facets of the image and its function, and thereby, reveal the fluctuating and unstable relationship between a name and a visual form.

The iconography of the "Episkepsis" expresses the paradox of the Incarnation by means of the supernatural way in which the medallion with Christ hovers on the Virgin's chest. Similarly, the Virgin's orante gesture speaks of her incorruptibility and the "fatherless conception." The image engages though a set of antitheses embedded in the dogma of the Incarnation. However, previous scholars have never considered the "Episkepsis" as part of the new "rhetorical" images that developed in the eleventh century such as the Basileus tes doksas or the Virgin Kykkotissa among others. This paper will integrate the "Episkepsis" within this group and explore the intellectual and spiritual developments, which triggered its creation.

Since the image became widespread only at the end of the eleventh and throughout the twelfth centuries, this paper will also focus on how the "Episkepsis" was exploited by the Komnenians as an expression of their Orthodoxy and a means to establish conformity to their imperial power.

The eleventh-century bronze doors donated by the Amalfitan merchant Pantaleon to the shrine of the Archangel Michael at Monte Sant'Angelo (FG), Italy, comprise twenty-three panels inscribed with captioned images of angelic activity within the realm of mankind, and a twenty-fourth bearing dedicatory inscriptions. Iconographic and liturgical analyses have led to an understanding of the doors as "gates of paradise" depicting one path of entry into heaven, via angelic assistance, while simultaneously establishing physical access to the surrogate heaven of the sanctuary and to the salvific rituals enacted therein; a didactic function may also be recovered by reading the angelic interventions as object lessons in God's consideration for mankind. Although a close connection between the doors and their site is implicit in such interpretations, the presence of the doors at Monte Sant'Angelo is not required for their derivation. This essay problematizes the relation between the bronze doors and the shrine and approaches the issues of encoded meanings through a consideration of the precise moments of event and text selected for presentation. When one looks closely at the specific images constructed to signal the mytho-historical foundation of the shrine, these doors, which would seem to be the epitome of medieval site-specificity, come strangely and quickly unmoored.

An examination of the three Panels representing the history of the shrine reveals a curious suppression of explicit links to the site. The moments selected for depiction are not, as one might expect, the actual manifestations of Michael at Monte Sant'Angelo that led to the foundation of the shrine, but three almost identically rendered apparitions of Michael in the dreams of an unidentified bishop, known from the foundation legend to be the bishop of Siponto. Not only did these apparitions occur several kilometers away from Monte Sant'Angelo, any indicators of geography or temporality have been edited out of image and caption alike. I suggest two interrelated reasons for this suppression of explicit references to the founding of Monte Sant'Angelo: as it had been the regnal shrine of the Lombard rulers, such references would have recalled a power structure only recently supplanted by that of the Normans; and undue emphasis on the shrine's status would have challenged Norman Mont-Saint-Michel, which had originated as a replica of Monte Sant'Angelo. The representation of Michael's apparitions in dreams was doubly suited to the type of ambiguity required, for in addition to figuring prominently in the foundation legends of both sites, dreams occur in a realm of their own that cannot be fixed in time or space. Medieval site specificity is thus reconfigured: it is not that the doors cannot be tied specifically to Monte Sant'Angelo, but rather that they can also be tied to Mont-Saint-Michel. The flexibility of referent generated by the visual program of the bronze doors benefits both sites, for just as the applicability of the doors to Mont-Saint-Michel bolsters its claims to veracity, the repetition of angelic activity---and its architectural results--at the later Norman site retrospectively validates the (now depoliticized) Italian shrine.

When Nasr-i-Khusrau visited Jerusalem in A.D. 1047, he saw and admired the new Byzantine mosaics in the Holy Sepulcher where "Heaven and Hell were represented and the Anastasis behind the Great Altar". Among these mosaics, he also saw "Abraham, Ishmael and Jacob and their children." Two hundred years later, the motif of the three patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob with bundles of souls held in their cloaks occurs among the figures of the Last Judgment at St. Trophime, in Arles.

Since Nasr-i-Khusrau was a good Moslem, he may have substituted Ishmael for Isaac in his description of three figures in the Last Judgment on the walls of the Holy Sepulcher. The older, Byzantine iconography for the Last Judgment represented only Abraham with the soul of Lazarus on his lap, as he is shown, for example in the great Last Judgment in Torcello. This is how the motif is adopted as early as the ninth and tenth centuries in Europe. The variant of this type showing film patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob instead of just Abraham has its origin in the Early Christian art of Syria and Palestine. In Yilanli Kilise, Cappadocia (second half of the eleventh century?), in Abu Ghosh, near Jerusalem (c. 1170), and in Mar Musa al-Habashi, near Nebek, Syria (A.D. 1192) the three patriarchs are represented along with the Last Judgment. By the thirteenth century, the motif is widespread in Cappadocia, Egypt, Italy, France and England.

This paper traces a single iconographic motif, the three patriarchs with souls in their laps, from their first appearance in Jerusalem to the wider Mediterranean basin and ultimately to the great cathedral portals of Europe.

Session VII: Architecture

Chair. Cecil L. Striker (University of Pennsylvania)

The Pantokrator Monastery, now the Zeyrek Camii in Istanbul, was undoubtedly one of the most important constructions of twelfth-century Byzantium, and it remains a critical monument for Byzantine architectural history. Built in three phases by John II and Eirene Komnenos between 1118 and 1136, the irregular complex consists of three adjoining churches, topped by five domes, with three asymmetrical narthexes and an enclosed courtyard. The Pantokrator is also the most important Byzantine monument in Istanbul lacking a detailed study. This is all the more surprising considering its state of preservation and the survival of its typikon, written in 1136, which details the liturgical use of the complex.

In collaboration with Profs. Zeynep Ahunbay and Metin Ahunbay of Istanbul Technical University, we have instigated a major program of restoration and documentation, begun in 1996. Our first concern is the stabilization of the building, which had fallen into disrepair during recent years. Presently we are completing the replacement of the lead roofing, including the repairs to fractured vaults and the reconstruction of broken arcading. We will begin work on the fabrication of new windows shortly.

As the work progresses, we have been able to make some observations concerning the historical development of the building, its construction methods, and its interior and exterior decoration. The purpose of the proposed communication is to discuss some of the issues raised by the restoration and to present the most recent discoveries from the Pantokrator.

The first publication of the rotunda church near Konjuh, a village now located in the northeastern part of the Republic of Macedonia, appeared in 1952,in the Zbornik of the Byzantine Institute in Belgrade; Svetozar Radojcic published a plan, photographs, a detailed description of the building, and a careful comparison of the church with other Early Byzantine ones in the region.

The rotunda, excavated by local villagers in 1919, stood ca. 200 m. south of a large, Late Antique, city site, whose ancient name is unknown. On the exterior the church formed a trapezoid, whose east and west walls are parallel; an apse projected from the east wall. A doorway in the west wall gave access to a small narthex flanked by apsidal rooms. Through a tribelon one entered the U-shaped aisle whose east ends formed pastophoria beside the presbyterium. A circle of piers and double columns divided the aisle from the "nave," except at the east side, where two large piers marked the west comers of the presbyterium, and the division between aisle and pastophorion. A chancel screen running between the two large piers formed the west edge of the presbyterium. On the interior the apse was semicircular, but a wall--straight on its west face, convex on the east-- ran across the chord of the apse, except at the south side where the entrance to a blind anular corridor formed by the two concentric apsidal walls was located. Three steps in the wall on the chord of the apse gave access to a platform in the apse above the corridor, where the episcopal throne would have stood.

Large, cut stone blocks w ere used for the walls of the rotunda; arches vaults, and dome were built of brick. One of the impost capitals bears an inscription in Latin: DOMATRIRS, in which the first letter takes the form of a Greek delta.

The sole archaeological investigation of the rotunda had been a very limited one carried out in 1988 by the Conservation Institute, whose report was not published. The lack of information did not prevent speculation and declarative statements about the pre-ecclesiastical use of the site and the martyr buried there. In 1998, however, a Macedonian-American team led by Kiril Trajkovski and Carolyn S. Snively carried out further study of the architecture and dug some test trenches. A number of our conclusions were negative, e.g., the blocks of the fascinating anular corridor have almost completely disappeared, and the church was built on an nearly sterile site with no trace of burials or even potsherds. On the other hand, the location of the rotunda near a sacred spring still venerated today suggests a quite different reason for its location, and the architect Misa Milojevic's new plan of the building together with his architectural observations will allow us for the first time to go beyond Radojcic's conclusions and to present a tentative new reconstruction of the rotunda.

The church of St. Nicholas in-the-Fields in Boeotia, has long been recognized as an important monument of middle Byzantine architecture in Greece. Although it is one of the few examples of domed-octagon church type, no particular study has ever been devoted to its architecture, and scholars only occasionally refer to St. Nicholas, almost always in connection to the monastery of Hosios Loukas. Actually, closer examination reveals that many features of the building present interesting similarities with the church complex of the monastery of Hosios Loukas, namely the church of Panaghia and the Katholikon. Apart from the similarity of plan with the latter, reflections of Hosios Loukas are evident even in the smaller details. For example, St. Nicholas is equipped with a semi-underground cross-in-square crypt with decoration analogous to the crypt of Hosios Loukas, large three-light windows of the Constantinopolitan type, and rib groin vaults that cover some subsidiary spaces. Also the original architectural sculpture would appear to deliberately imitate the sculptural decoration of Panaghia. On the other hand, St. Nicholas presents some classicising features not found in Hosios Loukas, such as the existence of a krepis and the use of marble slabs for the revetment of the exterior walls, which connect it with a trend of 12th and 13th century churches in Greece.

The exact history of the monastery of St. Nicholas is not known. Two early Christian capitals and one recently discovered late Roman one indicate that probably an earlier structure stood at this place. The oral tradition connects St. Nicholas with Hosios Loukas. The earliest textual evidence that we possess is from the 16th century, when an official document includes St. Nicholas among the metochia of Hosios Loukas.

It is the purpose of this paper to examine the different problems that the church of St. Nicholas raises, particularly in relationship to the question of imitation in Byzantine architecture. Was the repetition of significant architectural forms "the selective transfer of architectural elements" as it is called by Richard Krautheimer -- a deliberate effort for symbolic meaning or are the numerous similarities simply the result of the continuation of workshop practices?

The churches of medieval Armenia are striking to the eye, and the force of their visual impact has affected the way that we study them. Since its beginning in the late nineteenth century, scholarship on the architecture of Armenia has focused on visual analysis as a means of interpretation. The theories set out by Josef Strzygowski in Die Baukunst der Armenier und Europa, (Vienna, 1918), the foundational work of the field, are based almost exclusively on an examination of the ground plans and structural devices of medieval Armenian churches. Subsequent scholarship has continued with this method, producing, for example, typological studies of Armenian monuments, in which the buildings are classified according to their form. While these efforts have been useful, they leave many questions unanswered, and it is the purpose of this paper to explore new methodological directions for the field.

The contextual approach of current medieval and Byzantine art history, and particularly issues of patronage, may help us to formulate a new interpretative method. Using selected examples, this paper will outline a study of artistic patronage in medieval Armenia, considering ways in which artistic forms were actively chosen by contemporary patrons. It will focus on the domed, centrally-planned churches of the 7th to 10th centuries and draw upon the abundant contemporary epigraphic and literary data that pertains to them. Church inscriptions are particularly common in Armenia and typically outline details of the identity of the donor and the circumstances of the commission.

Artistic patronage was a reflection of the distinctive socio-economic structure that existed in medieval Armenia. Unlike in Byzantium and the Islamic Near East, Armenia was not made up of a network of urban centers, but rather of a group of dynastic families that ruled their own domains, possessed their own bishoprics, and commissioned their own churches and manuscripts. In rethinking the field of Armenian architecture, thus, the study of artistic patronage may improve our understanding of the monuments and the social and economic forces that informed them. In doing so, we may challenge the notion of Armenian architecture as a passive recipient of "imperial influence", supplement the prevalent approach of visual analysis, and open a new chapter in the study of the field.

Session VIII: Reading Byzantine Literature

Chair. Sarolta Takacs (Harvard University)

The Hagiographical Logos: Theology and Literary Composition in the Early Christian East

The genre of Christian literary biography emerged in the late fourth and early fifth centuries. A number of the earliest examples of Greek saints' lives were written by prominent theologians. These works contain both explicit and implicit ideas about the theology undergirding the production of Christian biography. Attending to theological constructions of the act of writing in early hagiographical works contributes to an understanding of the meaning and function of these works within late ancient Christian communities and affords perspective on the place of writing within the pious practices of authors.

Both Athanasius's Life of Antony and Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Macrina present themselves as letters. In an era before a genre of Christian biography was established, the effort to situate biography within an epistolary context had theological implications. In his festal letters, Athanasius compared Christian correspondence with God's sending forth of the logos into the world. The Life of Antony which presents its hero as "dominated by the logos" (VAnt 14.4), is a logos itself, a word sent into a community of Christian monks to assist in leading them to salvation.

Gregory of Nyssa, on the other hand, locates letters within Platonic discussions about the relationship between speech (logos) and writing. His epistolary biography of Macrina functions as a written logos about a holy person. This concept is enhanced by his playful description of his text as a "written longwinded speech," a suggraphike makregoria, among other things, a pun on Macrina's name. The significance of this blurring of speech and writing is revealed when Macrina's own deathbed autobiographical discourse is described as being "like a prose composition, " kathaper epi suggraphes. This collapsing of the gap or diastema between speech and writing has analogues in the incarnation and in the Eucharist, where the logos of God becomes present and immediate. Gregory launches his text as a eucharistic logos, a point underscored when he discusses thanksgiving as the proper aim of biography.

Both in the Life of Macrina and in the Life of Moses Gregory presents biography as a point of entry to contemplative philosophy. This presents a model for understanding biography as a subspecies of theology and of exegesis, rather than a separate genre. Finally, in a number of texts authors call on the Holy Spirit for inspiration, linking hagiographical texts to the- mechanism which cooperated in the production of the Bible. In each of these ways, hagiography becomes a theological exercise, a way for Christian authors to participate in the publication of the logos.

John os, the author of a poetic description of the pictures in a bath at Gaza, is one of the main representatives of the culture of this Palestinian city during the sixth century. Six Anacreontic poems have been handed down under his name by codex Vat Barb. gr. 310: an epibaterios?(scil. logos, "speech of arrival"), an encomium, an epithalamium, a schedion ("extemporaneous speech"), an epideictic speech, and an ethopiia. Published by P. Matranga (1850) and T. Bergk (PLG, vol.3, 1882), these poems have been generally neglected by Modern scholars as school exercises devoid of any literary value. They are however an important document of the Gazaean culture and society as it was immediately before the Arab conquest of Palestine. From a strictly literary point of view, these poems show the complexity and the variety of the poetry of Late Antiquity, in which the ancient tradition is renewed in original forms, and rhetoric becomes the preferred vehicle for the expression of poetic creation.

A comparison between John of Gaza's poems and the rules codified by the rhetorical treatises of Late Antiquity for each genre shows that the poems only partially conform to such norms. The way in which John 'breaks the rules' is a clue to our characterizing the audience to which his works were addressed. It was, first of all, a Christian audience. In the iambic introduction to the epithalamium the poet declares that he will leave apart the "licentiousness of the erotic language", surely so as not to displease his powerful and highly educated Christian patrons.

A clearer portrait of John's audience results from the first poem. In the hexametric prologue of the epibaterios, employing a technique used by Nonnus of Panopolis and his followers, the poet distorts the traditional epic diction and imagery, in order to express a fundamental detachment from the values of the epos, on behalf of a poetry, which combines sweetness and culture. The praise of the city, the usual object of an epibaterios is replaced by the celebration, in Hesiodic and Pindaric style, of the community of the Gazaean scholars and poets, which John considers a "second Helikon".

The sixth poem, a dialogue between Zeus and Aphrodite about the death of Adonis, begins as an ethopiia, an exercise typically mastered in ancient rhetorical schools, but later becomes a Platonic dialogue, in which Christian and Neoplatonic motives are intertwined in a sort of cosmology; the poem ends up in a critique of the traditional interpretation of myth. The sixth poem therefore, reflects the actual philosophical debate in that cultural environment, a debate aimed at reconciling the classical heritage with Christianity and Neoplatonism.

John of Gaza's poems confirm and widen the picture of the Gazaean culture which results from the works of other representatives of that literary community: a revival of Homer and the ancient authors through the language, technique, and style of Nonnus, and a revival of Plato through the interpretations of the Neoplatonists, with a Christian background.

Arabic-Greek Herbal Glossaries and the Appearance of Arabic Medical Terms in Greek Manuscripts

Herbal glossaries are a hitherto underutilized source for the history of Byzantine medicine. The paper will focus on four bilingual glossaries (Arabic to Greek) that survive in 15th and 16th century manuscripts and give the Arabic terms transcribed in Greek characters. Such glossaries seem to have been intended for individuals in the medical profession who did not know Arabic. Based on the format of these glossaries as they appear in the Greek MSS in which they survive, as well as the incorporation of Arabic medical terms in Greek medical texts, the paper will discuss the reason for and manner of compiling such glossaries. It will also discuss them in conjunction with non medical Arabic-Greek word lists, both published and unpublished, as well as a number of Arabic notes from Greek medical manuscripts, the earliest of which can be dated to the late 10th or early 1lth century.

The translations of Latin literature made by Maximos Planoudes are a rather startling feature of the so-called Early Palaeologan Renaissance. Of these translations, the Metamorphoses of Ovid is notable for its length, difficult Latin poetic diction, and narrative complexity. It is also a mine of sometimes obscure mythological information, a fact appreciated by readers both in antiquity and in the late medieval aetas ovidiana of western Europe.

Planoudes' Greek translation of the Metamorphoses takes its place among the other translations from Latin literature made by this scholar, who is known also for locating, preserving, explicating, and adapting the Greek literary heritage in thirteenth-century Byzantium. We are in a unique position to assess Planoudes' intentions as translator of the Metamorphoses because his autograph manuscript of the translation survives as Vaticanus Regineniis Graecus 132 and was identified by Alexander Turyn in 1974. Using my own transcriptions of Planoudes marginalia, and images of the manuscript itself, I shall examine the format and actual execution of the text in an attempt to assess how Planoudes intended his audience to use this literary work and what assistance he thought they would require in order to exploit its riches fully. I shall also assess the literary style and quality of the translation as a piece of thirteenth-century Byzantine literature, focusing upon the philosophical opening of the Metamorphoses (1. 1-88) and upon the Apollo/ Daphne episode (I. 452-567).

Session IX: Church Treasuries: Session in Honor of Margaret Frazer

Chair- Susan Boyd (Dumbarton Oaks)

Margaret Frazer's Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium entry on the Pala d'Oro in San Marco, Venice, read in conjunction with the entry on enamels, constitutes a masterly summary of the state of knowledge on this extraordinary altarpiece. In 1105 the Doge, Ordelaffo Falier, ordered an antependium from Constantinople; this is recognizable as the lower two-thirds of the present Pala. By 1209, when the antependium was remounted as a retable, six large feast scenes and a figure of the archangel Michael, looted from Constantinople, had been added; these constitute the upper third of the Pala. In 1342-5 the whole assembly was given the Gothic framework it retains today.

A comparison with the no longer extant enamelled altarpiece ordered from Constantinople by Abbot Desiderius of Monte Cassino will be used to suggest how such large commissions were undertaken, and a close examination of enamels on the Pala and elsewhere will be used to identify the workshop practices employed to fulfill them.

Much has been written about the enamelled 'donor portrait' of Ordelaffo Falier. The head of the Doge is an obvious replacement: a discrete enamel plaque, its edge coinciding with the outline of the halo and the Doge's neck, has been fitted into the main panel, in place of whatever head the figure originally had. The most favoured explanation has been that the figure originally represented Alexios I Komnenos: on the Pala, as an apparent pendant to Ordelaffo Falier, is the figure of an empress named Irene, almost certainly the consort of Alexios I whose portrait must originally also have appeared on the altarpiece.

It is, however, inconceivable that the panel depicting Ordelaffo Falier ever represented the emperor. Suggestions that the present inscription replaced an earlier one identifying Alexios can be dismissed: the temperature required for enamelling a new inscription would have irreparably and indelibly damaged the existing enamel on the panel, and the same argument rules out any change of colour--the Doge wears black boots, not the red ones appropriate to a Byzantine emperor. The only explanation which fits the physical evidence is that the figure of the Doge originally had no halo: on the Holy Crown of Hungary, made in Constantinople some thirty years earlier, enamel representations of the emperor Michael VII Doukas and his son are nimbed, whereas a bust of the Hungarian king is not.

The Doge's halo must have been an addition, necessitating a replacement head and neck, which it encloses. The position of the sceptre or staff of office over the Doge's shoulder limited the extent of the halo; this restricted the size of the new head, which in turn required an elongated neck to connect it to the rest of the figure. It was clearly important that Ordelaffo Falier should be depicted with a halo, even if it meant giving him a disproportionately small head and long neck. In a complementary study, John Osborne investigates the circumstances of the alteration made to the enamel.

"After the conquest of the city [of Constantinople] there was found inestimable wealth, most precious and incomparable stones, and also a part of the Cross of Our Lord, brought there from Jerusalem by Helena and decorated with gold and precious gem stones. This cross, which was held in highest veneration, was split into pieces by the bishops, who were present, and distributed among churches and convents after their return to their home countries." As the Chronica Regis Colonensis and other contemporary western chronicles recount, one of the most immediate effects of the Latin Conquest of Constantinople in 1204 was the plundering and subsequent dissemination of some of the most venerated religious objects of the Byzantine empire, which were formerly kept in the palaces and churches of the, capital. Charters, necrologies and inventories of many. western churches, abbeys and other religious foundations testify to the increasing number of Eastern relics and reliquaries in western treasuries, donated to them mainly by members of the aristocratic and ecclesiastical elite, who participated in what the anonymous chronicler from Halberstadt piously called a peregrinatio in Greciam.

Relics of the True Cross were perhaps the most prestigious and important among the many saintly relics that western noblemen, abbots and bishops brought back from their "Byzantine pilgrimage". Like the famous cross relic of Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos and Romanos II in the cathedral treasury of Limburg an der Lahn, many of these relics reached the West in their original Byzantine containers. Unlike the Limburg Staurothek, however, most of these containers suffered considerable damage over the centuries or have not survived at all.

The present paper examines a group of three closely related Byzantine True Cross reliquaries of a triptych format, which have not received much scholarly attention. Two of these reliquaries have survived in a rather poor state of preservation in the monastery of St. Marienstern near Dresden and the State Hermitage of St. Petersburg. The third which was in the possession of Amiens cathedral until the French Revolution, has not survived, but can be reconstructed from a detailed seventeenth-century description and sketches preserved in two manuscripts of the Bibliothque Nationale in Paris and the Bibliotque de Carpentras. All three reliquaries were once richly decorated with enamels, precious stones and filigree work, none of which has survived. A close examination of the remaining parts of the recently restored reliquary from St, Marienstern, its sisterpiece from St. Petersburg and the lost staurotheke from Amiens, however, permits a reconstruction of their former iconographic programs and overall appearance. As will be shown, these reliquaries were most likely manufactured in the same Constantinopolitan workshop, probably in the late tenth or early eleventh century. The reconstruction of this distinct group of reliquaries leads not only to a better understanding of certain technical aspects involved in the production of Byzantine Cross reliquaries, it also leads to a reconsideration of the important role western literary sources and documents play in our attempt to reconstruct the formal and iconographic appearance of the Byzantine material now lost.

John Osborne (University of Victoria)

Few aspects of the Pala d'Oro in San Marco, Venice, have engendered as much controversy as the plaque depicting the Venetian doge, Ordelaffo Falier (1102-1118), which forms a pendant to that depicting a Byzantine empress identified as Irene. This controversy stems from a striking visual anomaly: the head of the doge appears proportionally much too small for his body, and clearly has been replaced at some later date. A wide variety of theories have been proposed to explain this circumstance, with the weight of scholarly opinion believing that the figure originally depicted the Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos (or perhaps his son and successor, John), and that this was altered by the Venetians who preferred to honour their doge. In a complementary study, however, David Buckton has established that this theory cannot be maintained on technical grounds. The enamel plaque naming Ordelaffo Falier must always have depicted the Venetian doge. This paper will attempt to answer the questions of why and when this change was effected.

It's not difficult to determine why the enamel was altered. The only change was to the head of the doge, and the visual anomaly stems from the fact the space originally occupied by the head is now occupied by both the head and a halo! But there is no suggestion that the Venetians wished to promote Doge Falier as a candidate for sainthood. Rather, the halo should be seen in the context of contemporary Byzantine art, as an indication of imperial status. Haloes may be found on a variety of depictions of Byzantine empresses; and emperors, but the best object for comparison is the near-contemporary "Crown of St. Stephen" (Budapest). This depicts the Emperor Michael VII Dukas (1071-1078), and his son Constantine, with haloes, but this attribute is notably lacking from the depiction of the King of Hungary, Geza I. The purpose of the change to the head of Doge Falier was to lay claim to imperial status for the doge.

When was this done? The known history of the Pala d'Oro offers two moments when significant alterations were made: 1209 and 1345. Of these, the first is by far the most promising, and it is perhaps significant that this restoration was carried out by the Procurator of San Marco, Angelo Falier, a descendant of the doge in question. In the years immediately following the Fourth Crusade (1204), the doges entertained serious pretensions as successors to the emperors of Byzantium. Although the actual throne passed to Baldwin of Flanders, Doge Enrico Dandolo and his successors adopted the title "Lord of a quarter, and a half of a quarter, of the Roman Empire", and Dandolo himself was buried in St Sophia, possibly in the south gallery which had constituted a sort of "imperial box", The same years witnessed the addition of a series of imperial "trophies" to the public spaces of Venice, among them the porphyry tetrarchs and bronze horses of San Marco, and many other pieces of relief sculpture. By appropriating the tangible symbols of imperial power and authority Venice laid claim to that power -- and there was no more appropriate place to make such a claim than on the high altar of the state church, a building which served as a metaphor for the Venetian republic itself.

Vera von Falkenhausen (Universitˆ di Roma - Tor Vergata, Italy)

In the second half of the 10th century St. Sabas the Younger, a Greek monk from

Sicily, who had founded several monasteries in Calabria and Lucania, was quite an important personality in Italian ecclesiastical politics. According to his Bios (BHG 1611) written at the very end of the century by Orestes, patriarch of Jerusalem, a few years before he died (Rome,.February 6, 990), Sabas took the hiera keimelia of his monastery in Calabria to a friend's house at Amalfi, to rescue them from the Arab invaders. According to a document from Vietri (about 20 km east of Amalfi) dated 986 two monks ex genere Grecorum, the abbot Sabas, whom I would like to identify with the homonymous saint, and the priest Cosmas, offer to the modest church of S. Giovanni at Vietri a number of very precious objects: 10 liturgical Greek books, nine silken and linen garments, ten icons, 10 candele constantinopolitane and a turibulo constantinopolitanum (1). Some decades later, in the treasure of S. Nicola at Vietri (4-5) there are mentioned among other precious objects 11 yconas Constantinopoleas depictas auro and 27 candelas Constantinopoleas vitreas. Obviously the Byzantine origin of church ornaments was important to Greeks in southern Italy, even in the Norman period, as we know from the testament of the abbot of S. Salvatore di Bordonaro (nr. 8) and the Bios of St. Bartholomew of Simeri (BHG 235)

It is tempting to connect the Vietri treasures with the presence of St. Sabas in the area of Amalfi, for normally the inventories of Greek monasteries from southern Italy are rather poor and don't list more than those books and objects which were most essential for liturgy.

References in chronological order:

1) 986, 5. Giovanni a Mare (Vietri): Codex diplomaticus Cavensis, II, Milan-Pisa-Naples 1875, nr. 382, pp. 233 f; 2) 1032, SS. Maria Nea, Giovanni Evangelista, Giovanni Battista (Bari): Codice diplomatico Barese, I, Bari 1897, nr. 18, pp. 31 f; 3) 1050 (about), S. Salvatore (Reggio Calabria): A. Guillou, Le brŽbion de la mŽtropole byzantine de Rgion (vers 1050) (Corpus des actes grecs d'Italie du sud et de Sicile. Recherches d'histoire et de geographie; 4), Cittˆ del Vaticano 1974, p. 181; 4) 1058, S. Nicola di Gallucanta (Vietri): P. Cherubini, Le pergamene di S. Nicola di Gallucanta (secc. IX-XI), Altavilla Silentina 1990, nrs. 76-77, pp. 193-200; 5) 1065, S. Nicola di Gallucanta, (Vietri): ibid., nr. 88, pp. 219-223; 6) 1109, S. Nicola di Gallucanta (Vietri): ibid., nr. 126, pp. 309-313; 7) 1110, S. Nicola di Gallucanta (Vietri): ibid., nr. 127, pp. 313-315; 8) 1114 or 1119, S. Salvatore di Bordona