What first enticed and continues still to draw me to my field – vast, esoteric, fascinating, confounding – is Byzantium’s unique admixture of what now (in the 21st-century New England present) seems both approachable and strange, even as Byzantium in its own time seemed both familiar and foreign.
Byzantium provides endless questions for the curious. Even the traditional description of Byzantium — “Roman governance, Christian religion, Greek culture” — stubbornly resists a straightforward reading.
The monarchs of Constantinople were universally acknowledged as Roman, even as other kings claimed that title;
its Christianity was – by definition – ecumenical, even as other Christianities decried it as heresy;
it was acknowledged as the de facto medieval contributor to (never merely transmitter of) Hellenic learning, even as other centers of learning feigned at superiority.
I delight in the hard work of investigating the sources that remain.
I believe this labor is the goal: the historical habitus is learning to articulate an informed perplexity. That is, I am not a “Byzantine Historian” so much as I am a student of the past interested in helping to bring order to the engagement between “the historical past” and “the practical past”. When I am able to present the past as apparent paradox, in that refracted communicative act — shadows, traces, whispers — I can behold the richness and complexity of human experience as relationship, at once diachronic and synchronic, both haunting and homely.
The experience is humbling, inspiring, and profoundly disconcerting: what else?
Come, practice with us.