About the lecture

Adequately discussing the Roman, Greek, and Christian aspects of Byzantium (how they were experienced by the Byzantines during a millennium, how other medieval civilizations and modernity perceived these qualities in Byzantine culture) would be a book-length (and perhaps multivolume) project. A humble alternative is attempted here, in an effort to squeeze large topics within the confines of a lecture: a text foundational to the establishment of Byzantine studies as a modern academic discipline towards the end of the nineteenth century is used as a mirror of the field at that time, especially regarding a limited number of major and recurring topics in the modern historiography of Byzantium: its periodization, Roman self-identification, Christian identity, and relationship with the ancient Greek past. What is found there is compared with how twenty-first century scholarship approached the same questions. Some implications of the convergencies and differences for the present and future of the field are also drawn. 

About the speaker

Maria Mavroudi was born in Thessaloniki, Greece and studied Philology at the University of her native city before earning a Ph.D. in Byzantine studies at Harvard. Her scholarly work began by focusing on a tenth-century Byzantine book on dream interpretation that had been widely received in Latin and the European vernaculars and counted as the Christian dreambook of the Middle Ages. While generally viewed as a Byzantine invention partly based on the second-century manual of Artemidorus, she showed that it was a Christian adaptation of Arabic Islamic material and one among a larger group of texts originally written in Arabic or Persian and received into Greek between the ninth and the fifteenth centuries. During the next two decades, she worked on identifying the place of these translations within Byzantine literary culture and its reception in “East” and “West’ during the medieval and early modern period. This begs reconsidering the position of the ancient Greek classics within the Byzantine, Arabic, and Latin intellectual traditions, as well as the supposed marginality of Byzantium within a broader medieval intellectual universe. Her work was recognized with a MacArthur fellowship in 2002. Mavroudi is Professor of Byzantine History at the University of California, Berkeley, with additional appointments at the departments of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies and Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures.