Trends and turning points: constructing the late antique and Byzantine world

Constructing late antiquity and Byzantium: introducing trends and turning points / Matthew Kinloch -- Constructing the past through the present: the Eurasian view of Byzantium in the pages of Seminarium Kondakovianum / Francesco Lovino -- The power of the cross: the role of the helper in Kassia's hymns' narratological structure and its doctrinal implications / Laura Borghetti -- Tzetzes, Eustathius, and the 'city-sacker' epeius: trends and turning points in the 12th-century reception of Homer / Valeria Flavia Lovato -- Greek explicating Greek: a study of metaphrase language and style / Nikolas Churik -- Doing and telling administration and diplomacy: speech acts in the 13th-century Balkans / Milan Vukasinovic -- Laughing up the sleeve: the image of the emperor and ironic discourse in George Pachymeres' Historia / Maria Rukavichnikova -- The Roman Revolution: Leo I, Theodosius II and the contest for power in the 5th century / David Barritt -- The reinvention of the soldier-emperor under Heraclius / Theresia Raum -- Omens of expansionism? revisiting the Caucasian chapters of De administrando imperio / Kosuke Nakada -- The Madara horseman and triumphal inscriptions in Krum's early medieval Bulgaria (c.803-14) / Mirela Ivanova -- The emperor is for turning: Alexios Komnenos, John the Oxite and the persecution of heretics / Jonas Nilsson -- Eight hundred years of the cult of the archangels at Aphrodisias/Stauropolis: modern and ancient narratives / Hugh Jeffery -- Crosses as water purification devices in Byzantine Palestine / Stephen Humphreys -- Byzantium's ashes and the bones of St Nicholas: two translations as turning points, 1087-1100 / Alasdair C. Grant -- Changing profiles of monastic founders in Constantinople, from the Komnenoi to the Palaiologoi: the case of the Theotokos Pammakaristos Monastery in context / Elif Demirtiken.

"Trends and Turning Points presents sixteen articles, examining the discursive construction of the late antique and Byzantine world, focusing specifically on the utilisation of trends and turning points to make stuff from the past, whether texts, matter, or action, meaningful. Contributions are divided into four complementary strands, Scholarly Constructions, Literary Trends, Constructing Politics, and Turning Points in Religious Landscapes. Each strand cuts across traditional disciplinary boundaries and periodisation, placing historical, archaeological, literary, and architectural concerns in discourse, whilst drawing on examples from the full range of the medieval Roman past. While its individual articles offer numerous important insights, together the volume collectively rethinks fundamental assumptions about how late antique and Byzantine studies has and continues to be discursively constructed"--