In July, the RELEVEN project organised three panels at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds and was invited to present in a fourth. The Congress, which has been taking place since 1994, is the largest of its kind in Europe and welcomed over 2600 attendees this year. IMC 2023 was organised around the central theme of ‘networks and entanglements’, a topic which provided the perfect frame to share our ongoing research with international colleagues.
Our panels ran consecutively throughout the second day of the Congress, with each session exploring a particular strand of the RELEVEN project. Papers were given by members of our team along with invited participants from other European academic institutions.
Our first session, organized by Aleksandar, was ‘Re-Evaluating the Eleventh Century I: Intellectual Networks and Cultural Entanglements through Byzantine Textual Production.’
Since one of the main research foci of the RELEVEN project is textual production, this session aimed to trace intellectual trends and dynamics primarily through the study of texts. While textual culture is largely associated with the elite, it also includes, for instance, documents written within monastic institutions, translations, and letter-exchanges. These texts do not only represent important sources for the prosopographical study of the people mentioned in them, but they are also intellectual and material carriers of ideas that point to their geographical dissemination and to cultural entanglements of the period. The three papers in this session thus presented and discussed texts that reflect their production, reception of ideas, mobility and intellectual dynamics both within Byzantium and in relation to its neighbors in the eleventh century. Next to Aleksandar’s paper, our two invited presenters were Alessandra Guido from La Sapienza University of Rome and Dunja Milenković from CEU.
Aleksandar’s paper, titled ‘(Neo)platonism between Intellectual, Monk, and Patriarch: Plato and Neoplatonic Sources in Michael Psellos’ Letters to and Funeral Oration on Ioannes Xiphilinos’ discussed the interest in and reception of Plato, his philosophy and neoplatonic heritage among two friends and members of the eleventh-century Byzantine elite - a court philosopher/politician Michael Psellos and a monk and patriarch of Constantinople Ioannes Xiphilinos. A wider implication of Aleksandar’s paper is twofold: first, that eleventh-century polymaths, from both secular and ecclesiastical background, possessed wide knowledge and interest in Plato and, second, that vast majority of sources that we today label as ‘platonic’ and that were used by, in this case, Psellos and Xiphilinos, actually come from late-antique neoplatonic authors such as Proklos, Plotinos, Synesios, etc. Alessandra’s paper ‘Tales about faithful friends: Aspects of the Byzantine reception of the Kalila wa-Dimna’ had a more geographical and comparative character as it focused on the narrative known as Kalila wa-Dimna. Nested in a singular Byzantine speculum principis, Kalila wa-Dimna reached the Greek-speaking world between the 11th and 12th century thanks to the translations of two border crossers intellectuals, the Antiochean Symeon Seth and Eugenios of Palermo. Taking into account the role of a faithful friendship in particular in this narrative, Alessandra’s paper addressed, in a comparative perspective, some issues of the Byzantine reception and re-interpretation of the Arabic narratives. Finally, Dunja delivered a paper titled ‘The concept of Arts and Science in Eustratius’ commentary of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics II 19.’ Dunja, namely, discussed one of the few preserved Byzantine commentaries on the second book of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, whereby she examined and reviewed Eustratius’s stance on the difference between arts and sciences in his comments on section II 19 in Posterior Analytics. Dunja pointed out Eustratius’ conceptual changes in the traditional division of arts and sciences and attempted to situate Eustratius’ stance within a broader context of the Byzantine educational system in the twelfth century.
The first session of the RELEVEN project thus focused on the reception of philosophy and narratives in eleventh and early twelfth centuries, thus pointing out an uninterrupted intellectual and textual dynamics and exchange in this turbulent period for the Byzantine empire.
Our second panel of the day: ‘Re-Evaluating the 11th Century, II: Changing Perceptions of Place and Space in Response to Networks and Entanglements’ was organised by Lewis and investigated how perceptions of place and space developed in response to varied entanglements during the eleventh century. Each paper in this session was specifically dedicated to 11th-century interactions between Eastern Christian and non-Christian communities in the eastern mediterranean and central Asia, with the aim of building a more nuanced picture of the changing ideas of space which characterised this period.
Lewis’ paper ‘Armenians in the 1070s: New Perspectives on Entanglements between Byzantium and the Seljuk Turks’ explored Byzantine-Armenian relations and the arrival of the Seljuk Turks at the end of the eleventh century through the lens of monastic land ownership and legal culture. Benjamin Sharkey (Univeristy of Oxford) examined interactions between Christian metropolitans, Muslim rulers, and nomadic peoples in Central Asia in his paper ‘Between Baghdad and Samarkand: An East Syriac View of the 11th Century’. Kieran Hagan’s (University of Edinburgh) talk ‘Known Unknowns: Looking North from the Islamic Imperial Centres in the 11th Century’ explored the construction of the Caucasus from the perspective of Islamic Baghdad. In this panel we found that people's sense of place and space was always contingent on perspective, even more so when they faced new interactions with those they considered 'other'. Certain Eastern Christian historiographical sources reacted to new entanglements in a hostile manner, others offered periods of peculiar silence, active enthusiasm or emphasised continuity. Islamic writers, on the other hand, might use these interactions to construct normative ideals of their own community in opposition to and in tandem with the non-Islamic populations they encountered.
Our third panel of the day was ‘Re-Evaluating the 11th Century, III: The movement of people in the eleventh-century Europe’, and was organised by Márton. The session explored the subject of geographical movement from different aspects, and it focused on Europe and the Mediterranean in the 11th and 12th centuries. It was a hybrid panel, since two of the presenters gave their talks virtually.
Márton’s paper, ‘Moving individuals and royal power at the dawn of the Christian state of Hungary’, discussed the connection between the movement of individuals and political power in the reign of Stephen I of Hungary (997–1038). Péter Bara’s presentation, ‘Greek-Latin translators 1050–1150: the questions of location, movement and patronage’, dealt with travels of Latin-speaking translators visiting Constantinople in order to work with Greek texts. Péter focused on the patronage of the translations and the journeys, the social background of the translators, and the goals of these activities. Jack Roskilly’s paper, ‘Moving bishops and the empire in Byzantium, 11th-12th c.’, explored the political and administrative background of the travels of Byzantine prelates between ecclesiastic centres and the capital.
We closed out a full day of activity with a paper by Tara in a panel organized by the members of a fellow ERC project, DISSINET, headed by David Zbíral at the Masaryk University. The topic of the panel was ‘Networked Data: Collecting, Managing, and Analysing Relational Data in Medieval Studies, II’, and Tara spoke about the general idea of our STAR data model, and the work we have done in the past few months to apply this model to information about places in our sources, in line with the goals of our project’s ‘Place and Space’ strand. Rather than thinking of places as geographical coordinate specifications with some assigned type and names in various languages, we want to represent some of the information about places that our sources saw fit to mention: were they prosperous or poor? What kinds of people lived there, if they were cities; what were they used for, if they were not? The paper was followed by a very engaging and stimulating discussion about the cultural significance of places and how we might capture this in structured ways; it certainly gave us a lot of food for thought as we push on with this strand of the project.
