56th Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies - Byzantium from below: rural and non-elite life in the Byzantine world

Location
Arts Building
Dates
Saturday 12 April (09:30) - Monday 14 April 2025 (12:00)
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The Byzantine Empire was built on the backs of the rural and urban labour force.

From agricultural production and the extraction of raw materials to the physical construction of urban centres and buildings, the strength of the empire’s economy and its imperial administration rested upon complex networks of labourers, artisans and ‘local notables’, across its natural landscapes, in villages, and cities. While huge advances have been made in studying labour processes in recent years, the experiences of such populations within the Byzantine world have received comparatively less attention when compared to other fields of late Roman and western medieval studies. How the Byzantine Empire was experienced and understood by those far removed from its centres of governance and central networks of power, are crucial questions for understanding the lived experience of the mostly silent majority whose lives played out both within, and around, the empire’s fluctuating ‘borders’. Beyond exploring the contribution of rural communities and non-elites to modes of production, this symposium will also explore what can be said of the intricacies of their lives, societies, and what it meant to ‘be Byzantine’, viewed from below.  

Symposiarch

Dr Daniel Reynolds 

Cost

Full three days

  • Members of SPBS - £95
  • Non-members - £110
  • Students/ unwaged: - £50

One day

  • Members of SPBS - £55
  • Non-members - £65
  • Students/ unwaged - £30

Symposium Feast

Sunday 13 April 1930 (Kolkata Lounge Restaurant) - £40 per head

Online

  • Members: £20
  • Non-members: £35
  • Students/unwaged: £10

Programme 

Saturday 12 April

  • 09:30-09:45: Welcome from symposiarch 
  • 09:45-10:30: Keynote: Sharon Gerstel (UCLA), “Seeing villages over time: case studies from rural Greece”
  • 10:30-11:00: Tea and coffee  

Session 1: Documented Lives  

  • 11:00-11:25: Matthew Kinloch (Oslo), “Non-elite characters in late Byzantine history writing”
  • 11:25-11:50: Dora Konstantellou (Dumbarton Oaks), “When is a rural painter identified by name? Reading representations of painters in late Byzantine/medieval rural societies”
  • 11:50-12:00 Milan Vukašinović (Uppsala), “Collective subjectivity in the Athonite archives”
  • 12:00-12:10 Nikolas Hächler (Zurich), “The Dialogus de scientia politica: an anonymous comment on and critique of the early Byzantine state under Justinian I” (Communication)
  • 12:10-12:30: Questions 
  • 12:30-14:00:  Lunch 

Session 2: Law, Land and Property

  • 14:00-14:25: Arietta Papaconstantinou (Aix-Marseilles) “Byzantine “tormented voices” from the edge of empire”
  • 14:25-14:50: Jenny Cromwell (Manchester Metropolitan), “Patrons and property in rural Egypt in the early 8th century”
  • 14:50-15:00 Franka Horvat (UCLA), “Islanders’ perspective: the case of the Elaphiti Archipelago” (Communication)
  • 15:00-15:10 Thomas Laver (Cambridge), “Using tax registers to study labour relationships in the villages of Byzantine Egypt”
  • 15:10-15:30: Questions 
  • 15:30-16:00: Tea and coffee

Session 3: Landscape and Settlement

  • 16:00-16:25: Jim Crow (Edinburgh), “Rural settlement in the Cyclades: excavations at Kato Chora”
  • 16:25-16:50: Archie Dunn (Birmingham) “From communal corvées to fiscal and communal enterprises in medieval Byzantium” 
  • 16:50-17:15: Sophia Germanidou (Hellenic Ministry of Culture), “Unseen, unheard and disregarded: tracing female labour in the Byzantine countryside through an interdisciplinary approach"
  • 17:15-17:35: Georgios Makris (British Columbia), “Modest luxury? Rural cemeteries and grave goods in the Valley of Kalamas, Epiros”
  • 17:35-18:00: Questions 
  • 18:00-19:00: Wine reception

Sunday 13 April  

Session 4: Material Approaches and Labour  

  • 10:00-10:25: Flavia Vanni (Newcastle), “The contribution of rural artisans to Byzantine sacred spaces (11th-13th centuries)”
  • 10:25-10:50: Sean Leatherbury (Dublin) “Craft labour and rural communities in the late antique east”
  • 10:50-11:15: Anna Kelley (St Andrews), “Career opportunities: apprentice contracts and social networking in late antique workshops”
  • 11:15-11:25: Zeynep Olgun (Cambridge), “Ships in villages: maritime labour in Byzantine society” (Communication)
  • 11:25-11:35: Questions 
  • 11:35-12:00: Tea and coffee

Session 5: Social Life 

  • 12:00-12:25: Sophie Moore (Newcastle) “Title TBC”
  • 12:25-12:50: Vicky Manopoulou (Durham), “Processing villages: litanic experiences of rural communities in Byzantium”
  • 12:50-13:00: Rachael Helen Banes (Vienna), “Artisans or amateurs: who wrote the graffiti at late antique Aphrodisias?” (Communication)
  • 12:50-13:10:  Jacopo Dolci (Nottingham) “A Monument in Transition: The Artemision and the Evolving Urban Landscape of Late Antique Gerasa (c. 350–750)”
  • 13:10-13:20: Questions 
  • 13:30-14:30 Lunch (SPBS Exec)

14:30-15:30: Communications 

1) Irakli Tezelashvili (Courtauld), “Painted and adorned for the salvation of all of this valley: great and lesser’: Svan Churches of T’evdore, ‘the King’s Painter,’ Revisited”

2) Giuseppe Belsito (independent scholar), “The rural context in the Sicilian Theme (6th-8th centuries AD): an impoverished or a dynamic economic area within the overall Byzantine polity? Contradictory data emerging from recent archaeological excavations in Sicily”

3) Husamettin Simsir (Notre Dame), “Anthroponymic appellations, names, sobriquets, nicknames and titles of mid-15th-century post-Byzantine landholders in the Ottoman Balkans”

4) Nicolas Varaine (Paris), “Ordinary devotion in the late Byzantine world: looking for the modest donors of  Venetian Crete”

5) Bjarke Bach Christensen (Cambridge) New Ostraka Evidence for an Integrated Estate in Sixth-Century Byzantine North Africa

  • 15:30-16:00: Tea and coffee 

Session 6: Comparative perspectives 

  • 16:00- 16:30: Chris Wickham (Oxford) “The West’” 
  • 16:30-17:00: Hugh Kennedy (SOAS), “Slavery as a vehicle for social mobility in the early Islamic world”
  • 17:00-17:30: Questions 
  • 17:30-18:30: Wine reception 
  • 18:30-19:30: Travel to feast
  • 19:30: Feast (Kolata Lounge, 1488 Pershore Rd, Bournville, Birmingham B30 2NT)  

Monday 14 April

Session 7: Rural Life on Islands and Peripheries 

  • 09:30-09:55: Luca Zavagno (Bilkent), “‘From the gentle coast and where the stream descends from the grove of the river and all the high peaks there’. The countryside of large Byzantine islands in the early Middle Ages”
  • 09:55-10:20: Basema Harmaneh (Vienna), “On peripheries: exploring the non-elite universe in the late antique Levant”
  • 10:20-10:45: Angelo Castrorao Barba (Granada), “Living in the Sicilian countryside during the Byzantine-Islamic transition: archaeological perspectives”
  • 10:45-11:00: Questions
  • 11:00-11:30: Tea and coffee 
  • 11:30-12:00: AGM 
  • 12:00-12:30:  Closing remarks by Stuart Pracy (Exeter) and Leslie Brubaker (Birmingham)
  • 12:30: Closing of the symposium and announcement of the next symposium

Symposium Feast (Sunday 13 April 1930)

The symposium feast will be held at Kolkata Lounge 1488 Pershore Rd, Bournville, Birmingham B30 2NT.