Byzantium & Friends

A conversation with Nicholas Morton (Nottingham Trent University) about the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century, the terror that they inspired, and the strategies by which its targets tried to…

A conversation with Linda Safran (Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto) on the hitherto-unexplored world of Byzantine diagrams. We talk about maps, sundials, and more abstract represent…

A conversation with Paroma Chatterjee (University of Michigan) on the power that ancient statues still had in Orthodox Constantinople. In many contexts, they were more prominent than icons. We talk a…

A conversation with Dan Caner (Indiana University) about the different kinds of charitable giving in early Byzantium. We talk about the pre-Christian background, the role of institutions, and views a…

A conversation with Kim Bowes (University of Pennsylvania) about production and consumption in the Roman world, especially by the 90% of the population who are less represented in our literary source…

A conversation with Sergey Ivanov (Alexander von Humboldt fellow at the University of Munich; corresponding member of the British Academy) on the monuments, buildings, and ruins of the Byzantine phas…

A conversation with Jonathan Hall (University of Chicago) about how the archaeological past of the city of Argos was reclaimed in the long nineteenth century. What institutions and political debates …

A conversation with Eleni Kefala (University of St. Andrews) on the fall of two empires, the Byzantine and the Aztec. What role did these momentous events play in the emerging identity of western Eur…

A conversation with Gabriel Radle (University of Notre Dame) on the question of why and when adolescent girls or women "bound up" their hair. Which women did so, and under what circumstances? What ki…

A conversation with Stratis Papaioannou (University of Crete) about the mismatch between modern ideas of literature (on the one hand) and the texts, conventions, and goals of Byzantine authors (on th…

A conversation with Siren Çelik (Marmara University) about the many personas that the emperor Manuel II Palaiologos crafted for himself in his surviving works. In fact, we have more writings from him…

A conversation with Alexander Olson (independent scholar, British Columbia, Canada) about the secret lives of olive trees and oak trees in Byzantium. Contrary to what you may think, these were not cu…

A conversation with Oana-Maria Cojocaru (Tempere University, Finland) about the images of Byzantine children in our sources, and the experiences that they would have had, once they made it past infan…

A conversation with Filippomaria Pontani (Ca' Foscari University of Venice) on the ways that Byzantine scholars engaged with classical texts, and their place in the transmission and study of classica…

In a fun romp through some of the foibles, evasions, pretensions, and generally bad habits of scholarship, Tina and I take our fields to task for practices that make our eyes roll. Sure, we've probab…

A conversation with Christian Laes about one of the most joyous, dangerous, and often tragic, moments of life in antiquity and the Middle Ages: childbirth. We discuss the sad fact of infant mortality…

A conversation with Silvia Ronchey (University of Roma Tre) about the famous philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria, who was murdered in the early fifth century by goons working for Cyril, the bishop of t…

A conversation with Michael Grünbart (University of Münster) about the problem of imperial decision-making. Byzantine emperors are often presented to us as perfectly virtuous monarchs favored by God,…

A conversation with Jack Tannous (Princeton University) about the "simple believers" who made up the majority of the population of Byzantium (as well as the caliphate and just about any premodern mon…

A conversation with Jen Ball (City University of New York) and Betsy Williams (Dumbarton Oaks, also episode 47) on the study of Byzantine dress and fashion. How do we know what people wore? Was cloth…