Among the many problems besetting the study of Middle Byzantine economic history are those concerning adjustments to the partial demonetisation of transactions indicated by the fall-off in the numismatic record (of excavations, hoards, and stray finds) for the seventh to ninth centuries, and the origins of a subsequent remonetisation. The administrative systems through which the Middle Byzantine state met its various needs during this period, and the evolution of such systems in response to economic changes (often assumed to be of the state’s own making), have recently attracted attention, a development stimulated by the enrichment and re-ordering of the sigillographic record.

The Grottaferrata has been studied in terms of its function as ‘a re-affirmation of the social world’ and ‘an instrument of social reproduction’, and the roles of men and women have been examined in this context. No comparable study of the Escorial version has been undertaken. In this paper, we shall look at certain aspects of the behaviour of men and women in the E version, focusing on the text itself rather than on any social values or beliefs which it may reflect or express. The first part of the paper will examine the portrayal of the ideal man and woman and their antithetical, or anti-ideal, counterparts; the second part will concentrate on the structural implications of the role played by women in ΔA.

Hagiography and rhetoric appear incompatible according to modern conceptions of how each functioned in Byzantine society. Rhetoric, a vehicle of upward mobility, depended upon an elaborate theoretical literature and promised to skilled practitioners enviable professional reputations in remunerative public pursuits among influential people. Hagiography, in contrast, appealed to a socially diverse Christian audience and recorded the deeds of those who chose to seek spiritual rather than worldly rewards. Rhetoric and hagiography, however, intertwined inevitably in the Byzantine world, as did rhetoric and most literary genres. The basic intention of the hagiographer was, after all, to persuade, impress, and edify his audience, and the tenets of rhetoric assisted him in that goal. Since education in Byzantium included at all levels both the theory and practice of rhetoric, the educated portion of a hagiographer’s audience would expect him to use the familiar devices of rhetoric and would scorn poorly composed and incorrectly expressed hagiographic essays, no matter how spiritually beneficial.

In the history of European humanism law and legal scholarship have been distinctly connected with processes of ideological change. Conceptions of law, the uses of legal texts and the professional practices of lawyers have repeatedly provided the matrix within which the understanding of the collective destinies of societies has been shaped. It is therefore rather paradoxical that research on Venetian Crete, the foremost hearth of post-Byzantine civilization in the Greek lands whose experience has been stamped by a sustained growth of humanism over three centuries, has paid scant attention to this aspect of humanist culture.

The erotic symbolism of the apple in the writers of pagan Greece afforded the Byzantines an oft-chosen field for demonstrating both their learning and their ingenuity. This exercise in antiquarianism, however, tends to conceal among at least some segments of the population a continuing daily use of such symbolism and indeed a persistent belief in the efficacy of fruits of the apple-kind in promoting fertility. Even in the Hochsprache we hear of supposedly historical tales of the ninth-century emperor Theophilos signifying his choice of bride by means of an apple and of two apples sent as lovers’ gifts, one by the fifth-century empress Eudokia (consort of Theodosios II) and the second by a twelfth-century commoner (Seth Skleros), the former leading to a divorce, the latter to a successful prosecution for sorcery; while the tenth-century author Ioannes Geometres gives an otherwise unattested erotic aition for the tree’s creation — a beautiful and bashful young girl is so saddened and embarrassed when her drunken would-be lovers quarrel over her, with results fatal to some of them, that in response to her prayer she is metamorphosed into an apple-tree.

Reading Cavafy or Cavafy Reading or Cavafy’s Readings or Cavafy Reading Cavafy have been aspects of scholarly interpretive interests regarding either the author C.P. Cavafy or applied textual strategies. Relatively little attention has been paid to the reader on the opposite end of the chain of literary communication. The dominant paradigm of literary criticism regarding Cavafy’s texts has been for a long time the inference of the authorial intention by interpretive acts of the literary critic. Fragments of Cavafy Reading have been puzzled together to shed some light on the author’s poetically functioning brain. But — as recent approaches to the complex phenomenon of reading in Cavafy have shown — inferring some sort of ‘meaning’ can also be regarded as based on cooperative acts between reader and text and on shared knowledge about the procedures of interpreting texts.

Trebizond, on the southern coast of the Black Sea is separated by the distance of nearly one thousand kilometres from Ardabīl, the native town of Safawids, situated not far from the Caspian Sea. Despite that, in the midst of the 15th century fate amazingly brought together two royal families: the Grand Komnenoi of Trebizond and the Safawids of Iran. Shāh Ismācīl (1501–1524), the founder of the Safawid state was born in 1487/892 of Halima-begum, the daughter of the Trepezuntine despoina Theodora and the Aq Quyunlu ruler Uzun Hasan (1457–1478). Shaykh Djunayd Ṣafawī (d. 1460), the grandfather of Shāh Ismācīl, had nearly seized the city of Trebizond, about thirty years before the birth of his famous grandson. The Trapezuntine nobles left their sovereigns, the emperor John IV (1429–1459) and, likely, his sister Theodora, the future wife of Uzun Ḥasan and grandmother of Ismācīl. Trebizond remained unprotected and, if shaykh Djunayd were more persistent in his attempts to capture the city, who knows what would be the future of both celebrated dynasties.

The twentieth century has been the century of interpretation, representing at the same time its celebration and its devaluation. It opens with Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and Nietzsche’s statement that there are no facts but only interpretations and ends up in the early 1960s with Susan Sontag’s attack on interpretation and her dramatic appeal for an ‘erotics of art’ in place of a hermeneutics. However polemical Sontag’s attitude might seem, she is not the only one who expresses this kind of distrust toward interpretation. Others too talk about the ‘crisis’ of interpretation or its transgression.

In this note I propose to discuss very briefly some matters emerging from different stages of Byzantinism in 20th century Greek culture with reference to icon production. By Byzantinism I mean the adoption and subsequently the employment of notions, styles as well as techniques historically connected to Byzantine painting by convention.

The following remarks continue the review/overview of scholarship on Byzantine art history initiated in the preceding volume of this journal. The author stresses, once again, that her remarks are idiosyncratic, and that this review/overview makes no claims to be exhaustive. The omission of any article or book from the overview usually reflects either her own ignorance or her inability to get hold of it; in particular, offprints — especially from the less well-distributed journals — would facilitate inclusion in subsequent issues. Both the author and the editor reiterate their earlier appeals for criticism and advice on the form and content of the survey, especially as a different approach has been followed in this year’s article.