Canadio-Byzantina a Newsletter Published by the Canadian Committee of No.32, January 2021 Byzantinists
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Canadio-Byzantina A Newsletter published by the Canadian Committee of No.32, January 2021 Byzantinists St Saviour in Chora (Kariye Camii) the last judgement (14th century); the church, having been a museum, is now being reconverted to a mosque Contents: Book Review (S. Moffat) 26 Activities of Member 3 Obituaries 28 Reports & Articles AIEB business 30 Report on Baturyn (V. Mezentsev) 13 Short notices 33 The Perpetual Conquest (O. Heilo) 18 Disputatio Virtualis 34 Crisis at the Border CIBS 1990s lecture links 35 of Byzantium (p. boudreau) 22 Essay Competition 35 2 A Newsletter published by the Canadian Committee of Byzantinists No.32, January 2021 Introductory remarks Welcome to the ninth bulletin that I have put I have repeated some information from an earlier together, incorporating, as usual, reports on our issue here to do with the lectures given in the members’ activities, reports on conferences and 1990s, originally organised by the Canadian articles, a book review, and announcements on Institute for Balkan Studies; among the authors forthcoming activities or material or events of the papers are Speros Vyronis, Jr., Ihor relevant to Byzantinists. Ševèenko and Warren Treadgold. I alluded to them in passing last year, but I thought it sensible Readers will note that this issue is rather less to give full details here: see p.35 below. handsomely produced than than the last few, for which I can only apologise. Chris Dickert, who There is no need for me to comment here on the had polished the latest issues so well, is no problems all have faced this year; many longer available to help, so that I must fall back colleagues mention them in their annual reports. on my own methods. I have tried nonetheless to Much has been written on plague as a result, make the lay-out as attractive as I can, even if I notably on that which arose during the reign of am still using WordPerfect X5; I find it hard to Justinian, viz. the Early Medieval Pandemic; I manipulate images in MS Word, which I usually contributed to this torrent of material myself use. Not all hyperlinks seem to work in (upon request, I hasten to ask) in the bulletin of WordPefect, alas, so please bear this in mind. I the Spanish Byzantinists, reprinted in that of the am naturally open to collaborate with those more Swedish centre in Istanbul. Details may be found proficient in these issues than I am: proposals are in my report below. These requests gave me the more than welcome! idea of including material by colleagues overseas, in this case that of Olof Heilo about Since 2017 our membership fees have remained Hagia Sophia. The COVID pandemic has the same: Full membership costs $30, student perhaps obscured some of the measures being membership $15. See further the report on our taken in Turkey today, which is why I thought current situation by our treasurer, Richard his article would be of interest. I am glad also to Greenfield, on p.13; I am grateful to him also for be including material by our members peter proofreading this issue. The funds are to cover boudreau and Stefan Moffat: reviews and reports our dues to the AIEB and to allow us to offer our are always welcome. In the end, contrary to my annual essay prize. expectations, we have ended up with a bumper issue. Readers will also find details on the I am sorry to be including two obituaries in this deferred international congress here as well as on issue. Despite the death of Fr Dimnik, an initiative to do with the governance of the Volodymyr Mezentsev has contributed a report AIEB. Our website remains (in principle) at: on the Baturyn excavations in recent years, a feature that has adorned every issue for many http://www.scapat.ca/canbyz/ years now. The other obituary is that of Thanos Fotiou, whom I used to see regularly in Ottawa, but we are still working on reestablishing it after the author of several articles still widely cited SCAPAT renewed its ownership of this domain. about the Dialogus de Scientia Politica of the sixth century. It remains just to wish our members a pleasant and less stressful 2021! Geoffrey Greatrex Canadio-Byzantina 32 (January 2021) 3 ACTIVITIES OF MEMBERS George Amanatidis-Saadé, University of Ottawa I am a second-year doctoral student under the supervision of Dr. Geoffrey Greatrex in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Ottawa. I have just recently won the Joseph-Armand Bombardier SSHRC Doctoral Scholarship for my Ph.D. project which primarily involves the creation of a critical biography of Marutha of Martyropolis. I presented at the 20th Annual Symposium of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies (CSSS) in November this year. My paper, which will be published in the Journal of the CSSS this upcoming year, looks at how the Shah Yazdigird I used the Syriac Christian community of his realm to further a cosmopolitan agenda in a time of peace between Rome and Persia. Additionally, I will be pursuing a year-long co-tutelle in Paris with Dr. Christelle Jullien at the Institut national des langues et civlisations orientales (INALCO), part of the Université Sorbonne Paris Cité. This co-tutelle will take place during the 2021-2022 academic school year. My collaboration with Dr Jullien has in fact already begun, as Dr Geoffrey Greatrex and I have co-authored a chapter on Romano-Iranian relations in the early fifth century for Dr. Jullien’s collective book Discourse, power issues and images. Transversal studies on the reigns of Yazdgird I and Wahrâm V, which will be published in late 2021 in the Late Antique History and Religion collection by Peeters Publishers. Emmanuel C. Bourbouhakis, Department of Classics, Princeton University Like so many, I saw my working life upended by the pandemic as my academic credentials and years of teaching came up wanting when trying to teach phonics, math, or French to our five-year old. By contrast, writing books and articles about Byzantium now feels more like leisure. Among these is a monograph in progress about Byzantine letter-writing as a literary practice with socioeconomic roots in later Roman society, part of which was distilled into a chapter for the recent Brill Companion to Byzantine Epistolography, titled ‘Epistolary Culture and Friendship’. A return to teaching Greek palaeography has given new momentum to work on a critical edition of the Rhetorica et grammatica of the eleventh-century court intellectual, Michael Psellos, being carried out with my colleague in Firestone Library, David Jenkins. Byzantine manuscripts also form the backbone of a study of the mediaeval reception of ancient Greek literature, provisionally titled ‘Beyond Transmission: The Mediaeval Reception of Antiquity and the Making of the Classical Canon’. Finally, having allowed him to lie fallow after a period of exhaustive cultivation, I have returned to the learned Byzantine classicist Eustathios, with forthcoming articles on his varied corpus, including his extensive commentaries on Homeric epic and that on the Description of the Known World by the second-century geographer Dionysios Periegetes. 4 Canadio-Byzantina 32 (January 2021) Awaiting publication, at various points in the proverbial pipeline, are articles about Byzantine funerary laments, historiography and the Byzantine renovatio imperii, and the effects of poetic study on Byzantine prose composition. In addition to ‘Greek Palaeography and Mediaeval Manuscript Culture’, I will be teaching ‘Introduction to Late Antique and Byzantine Literature’ this Spring, all remotely, of course. Finally, my Byzantinist colleagues at Princeton and I look forward to restarting our rather successful monthly ‘Re-Imagining Byzantium’ workshop series this Fall, attended by Byzantinists and fellow travellers from the wider academic catchment area. peter boudreau, McGill University, Montreal I am a fourth year PhD candidate in the department of art history currently working on a dissertation that explores how late Byzantine imagery could both visualize time as well as navigate different temporal systems. This summer I completed my first chapter on “iconic time” with particular emphasis given to Sinai’s calendar icons and presented material from this chapter at the 2020 Canadian Conference of Medieval Art Historians at Guelf University and the 2020 Byzantine Studies Conference (held virtually). I have now begun preliminary work on my next chapter which explores the revival of the personifications of the months in monastic manuscripts and erotic novels while also preparing to co-teach an introductory survey of world art in the winter term. Aurora Camaño, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver In 2020, I completed my comprehensive examinations and became a PhD Candidate in Archaeology at Simon Fraser University. I have now begun the research stage of my dissertation on Roupenid Cilicia, which examines questions of identity and nostalgia in contexts of relocation as performed through the built landscape. Spring 2020 also marked the beginning of my university teaching career, as I was given the opportunity to design and facilitate a new third-year special topics course in Byzantine Art and Archaeology that was cross-listed between the Hellenic Studies, Humanities, and Archaeology departments at SFU. In fall of 2020 I began a new Research Assistant position for Dr Sabrina Higgins which combines digital humanities, art history, and Mariology. In addition to my doctoral programme and professional commitments, I completed a book chapter on the archaeology of forced migration (forthcoming) for the IEMA series, presented preliminary findings at the Society of Architectural Historians annual meeting, and co-organized the plenary session on Creative Pedagogies in Byzantine Studies for the 2020 Byzantine Studies Conference with Dr Marica Cassis. I also gave a paper in this session which reflected on the challenges of teaching Byzantine Archaeology in the absence of physical collections and discussed how I approach engaging with the material past in the virtual classroom.