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Church and State, Religion and Power in Late Antique and Byzantine Scholarship of the Last Five Decades

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Claudia Rapp*
Affiliation:
Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, University of Vienna

Extract

Tackling issues of church and state is a tall order under any circumstances. Taking the metahistorical view and summarizing the scholarship on church and state makes it positively daunting, especially when the half-century under consideration spans the entire lifetime of the author. This task is made even more challenging when the societies and cultures under investigation are late antiquity and medieval Byzantium, the former (c.300–c.800, encompassing the entire Mediterranean) a paradigmatic period of religious change, the latter (330–1453, focusing on the Greek-speaking eastern half of the Roman empire and its subsequent history) emblematic of ‘otherness’ when compared to the Christian tradition in the West that has shaped our worldview to the present day.

Type
Part III: Church and State in History
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2013

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