Natalie Zemon Davis Annual Lecture Series - Averil Cameron: Arguing it out: discussion in Byzantium I. Inside Byzantium: a new social history?

Type: 
Series
Audience: 
Open to the Public
Building: 
Nador u. 9, Faculty Tower
Room: 
Auditorium
Friday, October 17, 2014 - 5:30pm
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Date: 
Friday, October 17, 2014 - 5:30pm to 7:00pm

 The social and cultural history of Byzantium seems at first sight unsuited to the kind of thick description at which Natalie Zemon Davis excels. Yet recent scholarship that aims to locate Byzantine culture and society within new global and transnational approaches to history demands a more nuanced understanding. In these lectures Prof. Cameron will explore the question of what kind of thick description can be provided. She will focus on the long twelfth century, a time of intense creativity as well as of rising tensions, and one for which literary approaches are currently a lively area in current scholarship. She will argue for their integration within a broader approach to Byzantine social and cultural history focusing on discourse, and drawing on the many kinds of dialogue texts (secular and religious) that were a key feature of Byzantine textual production.

Inside Byzantium: a new social history?

In contrast with most social history written about Byzantium, this lecture argues for an emphasis on discourse as a necessary part of the sociology of culture. In particular it makes the case for the integration of religious or theological writing with secular, in the context of the vibrant cultural development in the twelfth century that some have called a ‘Third Sophistic’. The last period of Byzantium, after 1204, is enjoying new attention in terms of transnational history and social analysis, while historians of late antiquity have also enthusiastically adopted theoretical approaches.  Prof. Cameron suggests that the society and culture of Comnenian Byzantium can also benefit from these broader analyses. 

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