The relationship between the Byzantine emperors and their bishops has been the subject of much debate. On the one hand, emperors could exert utmost control over the ecclesiastical hierarchy through episcopal appointments and depositions. However, the Constantinian integration of church and state presented a significant handbrake to such imperial pretensions with the ever-present prospect of civil unrest and accusations of heresy working to moderate episcopal interference.

The introduction provides a general description of asylum periodicals and a brief introduction to the publishing and medical contexts within which they emerged. Then it discusses the place of asylum periodicals in the ongoing disputes over the social function of psychiatry and mental institutions. I challenge the suspicion with which historians and literary scholars have approached asylum periodicals due to their dual function of serving both patients and institutions. While scholars have perceived asylum periodicals as defined by censorship and, consequently, inauthenticity and unknowability, I argue that asylum periodicals’ positioning does not compromise their value as historical records but requires different approaches to their study, borrowed from book history and literary and periodical studies. A recognition of asylum periodicals and their producers as agents in wider literary networks enables further consideration of these publications and an acknowledgement of their potential to facilitate the generation of new insight about asylums, their inhabitants, and nineteenth-century print culture.

This chapter explores the significance of the interaction between desert and city for the emergent church and its theology in early Byzantium. First, it examines how the desert resisted the city, focusing on the iconic figure of Antony the Great and the early desert dwellers. In withdrawing from the city, the anchorites also withdrew from the spatial and temporal dimensions of earthly life, entering the depths of their consciousness and being. Second, it probes how the desert sought to transcend the city, focusing on Barsanuphius and John in the mid-sixth century. The ascetic ways of these two Old Men, dying unto themselves and the world, as well as the wisdom of their 850 letters, portray a desire for spiritual constructs that overcame city conventions. Third, it looks at the hagiographic portrait of Mary of Egypt and how her liturgical afterlife shaped and transformed the city.

How has the Mashriq, as a geopolitical and poetic space shaped by colonial legacies, protracted wars, and literary resistance, been imagined? Focusing on South Lebanon, the chapter examines how poets like Abbas Beydoun and Jawdat Fakhreddine reimagine the region’s ruins not as symbols of loss but as sites of resistance and memory. Through close readings of their poetry, it traces how classical Arabic motifs – especially aṭlāl (ruins) – are reworked to confront Israeli occupation and the silencing of the South in dominant literary narratives, arguing that these poets forge a counter-archive that challenges Beiruti-centric war literature and reclaims the South as a central locus of cultural production. In doing so, the chapter situates the Mashriq within a broader framework of anticolonial poetics, where literature becomes a form of witnessing, survival, and political imagination.

This article discusses the formational qualities of Byzantine church decoration, especially icons. It proposes that the iconographic programs of Byzantine churches had a profound effect on the viewers by offering them models for faithfulness and virtue and facilitating their transformation into ideal Christian subjects. My intention is to show that icons in the church do not simply interact with the viewers, but also form and transform them. I explore how iconic subjects worked in Byzantine churches in light of Ivan Drpić’s important insight about the Byzantine self as fundamentally relational and as ‘a replicable likeness’. I wish to show how mosaics and frescoes in Byzantine churches could provoke transformational experiences for their viewers by inviting identification with models of faithfulness and virtue.

Peter Ronaldson was an inmate of the Royal Edinburgh Asylum in the 1840s and contributed to the first issue of its Morningside Mirror. Soon after the publication of the periodical, Ronaldson escaped. Tracing Ronaldson’s story in the available records, the conclusion reflects on the difficulty of constructing coherent narratives out of partially preserved complex and fluid institutional experiences. It nevertheless argues that asylum periodicals are invaluable resources for understanding life in nineteenth-century institutions, suggests directions for further research using the publications, and highlights their relevance to mental health and Mad activism.

This chapter explores the practices and economies of pilgrimage within the Byzantine cultural sphere. The development of Christian pilgrimage sites in the early Byzantine period contributed to the consolidation of Christianity by offering performative spaces for forming and asserting Christian identity. Attention in the first half is given to the origins of Christian pilgrimage, travel economies and the intersections between religious groups within the ritual spaces of pilgrimage sites, along with a brief survey of scholarly approaches to the phenomenon. The second half of the chapter offers two ‘multi-religious’ sites, the Oak of Mamre and the Baths of Ḥammat Gader, as case studies to further explore pilgrimage centres as locations that facilitated experimentation and readjustment in religious identification. Material and literary evidence suggest that pilgrimage activities at these two sites were not simply expressions of Byzantine piety but were instrumental in transforming and maintaining cultural identifications.

bishop, heresy, liturgy, martyr, orthodoxy, patriarch, procession. Byzantine Christology—the views about Christ developed in the Christian East in between the Council of Chalcedon (451) and the fall of Constantinople (1453)—continues and intensifies the creative adoption and adaptation of Greek philosophical terms, and the forging of a sophisticated theological glossary for Christianity understood as ‘true philosophy’. This conceptualisation of the faith occurs as a result of two concurrent phenomena: first, the assumed need for increasingly precise definitions of doctrinal orthodoxy to meet the challenge of perceived heresies; second, the ongoing transformation of Christianity from an apocalyptic and messianic Jewish sect of the Second Temple Era into the cosmopolitan faith of the post-Constantinian Empire. The Christological reflections of learned expositors of the Christian dogma and the formulations put forth by the councils cannot be understood, however, without keeping in mind the specifically ‘religious’ factor.Its unique and elusive parameters are revealed in practices of prayer and ascetical exertion, reading and interpreting sacred texts, liturgical worship and artistic creation. The present essay suggests that homilies, hymns and icons, generally, and their underlying Christian exegesis of theophanies, in particular, offer the proper entry-point and framework for understanding Byzantine Christology.