Landscape, Nature, and the Sacred in Byzantium PDF Download

Author: Veronica della Dora
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316495590
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Nature is as much an idea as a physical reality. By 'placing' nature within Byzantine culture and within the discourse of Orthodox Christian thought and practice, Landscape, Nature and the Sacred in Byzantium explores attitudes towards creation that are utterly and fascinatingly different from the modern. Drawing on Patristic writing and on Byzantine literature and art, the book develops a fresh conceptual framework for approaching Byzantine perceptions of space and the environment. It takes readers on an imaginary flight over the Earth and its varied topographies of gardens and wilderness, mountains and caves, rivers and seas, and invites them to shift from the linear time of history to the cyclical time and spaces of the sacred - the time and spaces of eternal returns and revelations.

Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004523006
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 705

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Book Description
Compensating a four-decades shortfall, this collective volume is the first reader in Byzantine spatial studies. It offers a diversity of topics and scientific approaches, articulated by up-to-date interdisciplinary dialogue, and reflects on the future challenges of Byzantine spatial studies.

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Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004537783
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
This book presents new approaches to the study of typology in Late Antique and Byzantine art and architecture and highlights the importance of type and archetype in constructing architecture and image theories.

Author: Alexander Olson
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030599361
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
This book illuminates Byzantines' relationship with woodland between the seventh and twelfth centuries. Using the oak and the olive as objects of study, this work explores shifting economic strategies, environmental change, and the transformation of material culture throughout the middle Byzantine period. Drawing from texts, environmental data, and archaeological surveys, this book demonstrates that woodland's makeup was altered after Byzantium's seventh-century metamorphosis, and that people interacted in new ways with this re-worked ecology. Oak obtained prominence after late antiquity, illustrating the shift from that earlier era's intensive agriculture to a more sylvan middle Byzantine economy. Meanwhile, the olive faded into the background, re-emerging in the eleventh and twelfth centuries thanks to the initiative of people adapting yet again to newly changed political and economic circumstances. This book therefore shows that Byzantines' relationship with their ecology was far from static, and that Byzantines' decisions had environmental impacts.

Author: James S. Bielo
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135006291X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
How do Christians make relationships with land central to their faith? How have the realities of materiality, geography, and ecology shaped Christian territories of belonging and theologies of territory? What social-economic-political conditions surround exchanges between religion and nature? This book explores how Christianity intersects with nature to create unique religious landscapes. Case studies range from the Mormon Trail across the USA completed by thousands every year, to the Catholic devotional cult of and shrine to St. Padre Pio of Pietrelcina. Contributors examine the entangled forms of agency between nature and culture that are at work as Christians produce, consume, experience, imagine, inhabit, manage, and struggle over formations of land. Focusing on Christian engagements with land forms in the early 21st century, this book advances the spatial turn in the study of religion, contributes to the anthropology of religion and the study of global Christianities, as well as our understanding of the relationship between Christianity, space and place.

Author: Mirko Breitenstein
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 3643148755
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
The fact that certain cultures and religions produced a way of life which, for the sake of self-perfection, expected its adherents to withdraw from various obligations to the world and to enter into the organisational structure of a monastic community obviously represents a constant anthropological foundation. The spectrum of monastic life within these various cultures was extremely diverse in its manifestations. It was the result of a high degree of flexibility in the face of constantly changing ideas about piety, social needs and concepts of community and individuality. However, an interreligious study with the aim of a scholarly analysis of comparable key elements across different monastic cultures does not exist yet. The editors as well as the authors of this volume are particularly interested in how monastic life was realised communally in many ways according to fixed norms and rules, how it shaped the understanding of community and civilisation and therefore made a decisive contribution to the formation of our cultural identity.

Author: Adam J. Goldwyn
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319692038
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Byzantine Ecocriticism: Women, Nature, and Power in the Medieval Greek Romance applies literary ecocriticism to the imaginative fiction of the Greek world from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries. Through analyses of hunting, gardening, bride-stealing, and warfare, Byzantine Ecocriticism exposes the attitudes and behaviors that justified human control over women, nature, and animals; the means by which such control was exerted; and the anxieties surrounding its limits. Adam Goldwyn thus demonstrates the ways in which intersectional ecocriticism, feminism, and posthumanism can be applied to medieval texts, and illustrates how the legacies of medieval and Byzantine environmental practice and ideology continue to be relevant to contemporary ecological and environmental concerns.

Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004689354
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 570

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Book Description
How did humans and the environment impact each other in the medieval Eastern Mediterranean? How did global climatic fluctuations affect the Byzantine Empire over the course of a millennium? And how did the transmission of pathogens across long distances affect humans and animals during this period? This book tackles these and other questions about the intersection of human and natural history in a systematic way. Bringing together analyses of historical, archaeological, and natural scientific evidence, specialists from across these fields have contributed to this volume to outline the new discipline of Byzantine environmental history. Contributors are: Johan Bakker, Henriette Baron, Chryssa Bourbou, James Crow, Michael J. Decker, Warren J. Eastwood, Dominik Fleitmann, John Haldon, Adam Izdebski, Eva Kaptijn, Jürg Luterbacher, Henry Maguire, Mischa Meier, Lee Mordechai, Jeroen Poblome, Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, Abigail Sargent, Peter Talloen, Costas Tsiamis, Ralf Vandam, Myrto Veikou, Sam White, and Elena Xoplaki

Author: Gabriel R. Ricci
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000007553
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
The academic treatment of the environment and nature, since the 1980s, has been formalized in sub-disciplines like environmental history, environmental philosophy, ecocriticism, and eco-spirituality. Within these disciplines the concept of nature has been variously employed to reorient humanity to a holistic moral standard. In each case there is general consensus that inquiry ought to turn on moral considerations of the interaction of humans and the environment; with implied admonitions to live sustainably. Lending credence to the Earth as a superorganism in its own right, these modern ecological expressions can be traced to Rachel Carson’s revelations in Silent Spring. However, they have a long pre-history which appears in monistic philosophy, the spirit of Deism, in both Romanticism and the Enlightenment, and in political expressions of the idea of Nature’s God, designed to promote a secular vision of the state and to overturn predatory religious rivalries. With this literary momentum, Natural Communions, volume 40 of Religion and Public Life, gathers interdisciplinary essays which reconfigure humanity within an ecotheological anthropology and which treat the idea of the sacred from the perspective of an Earth-centered spirituality, thus redefining humanity’s response to ecological challenges and initiating a new status within a more expansive cosmology complete with a naturalized conception of Divine Reality.

Author: Alice-Mary Talbot
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268105634
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
In this unprecedented introduction to Byzantine monasticism, based on the Conway Lectures she delivered at the University of Notre Dame in 2014, Alice-Mary Talbot surveys the various forms of monastic life in the Byzantine Empire between the ninth and fifteenth centuries. It includes chapters on male monastic communities (mostly cenobitic, but some idiorrhythmic in late Byzantium), nuns and nunneries, hermits and holy mountains, and a final chapter on alternative forms of monasticism, including recluses, stylites, wandering monks, holy fools, nuns disguised as monks, and unaffiliated monks and nuns. This original monograph does not attempt to be a history of Byzantine monasticism but rather emphasizes the multiplicity of ways in which Byzantine men and women could devote their lives to service to God, with an emphasis on the tension between the two basic modes of monastic life, cenobitic and eremitic. It stresses the individual character of each Byzantine monastic community in contrast to the monastic orders of the Western medieval world, and yet at the same time demonstrates that there were more connections between certain groups of monasteries than previously realized. The most original sections include an in-depth analysis of the challenges facing hermits in the wilderness, and special attention to enclosed monks (recluses) and urban monks and nuns who lived independently outside of monastic complexes. Throughout, Talbot highlights some of the distinctions between the monastic life of men and women, and makes comparisons of Byzantine monasticism with its Western medieval counterpart.