The book will appeal to scholars and students alike interested in identity formation and expression in the Byzantine provinces, as well as those researching the social history of the poor in Byzantium, and the mechanisms of hierarchies, social marginalisation, and oppression.
Utilising new methodological approaches to understanding not only the poor as a social and economic group but also of the internal means of stratification which informed social organisation within local communities, this book looks at the place of the poor within the multi-layered hierarchies of Byzantine society using evidence from archaeology, art, architecture, as well as narrative, theological, and legal texts. Rather than treating the different levels of society independently, it looks at the social interactions which replicated and reinforced hierarchies but were also subject to negotiation within local communities. Fifteen leading Byzantine scholars discuss and analyse the topic of social hierarchies in the Byzantine Empire, covering topics such as working lives, the material world, the stratification of space, and philanthropy and social obligation.
The book will appeal to scholars and students alike interested in identity formation and expression in the Byzantine provinces, as well as those researching the social history of the poor in Byzantium, and the mechanisms of hierarchies, social marginalisation, and oppression.
Introduction
1 Voicing the Rich and the Poor in Byzantium, a Methodological Problem
Anna C. Kelley and Flavia Vanni
2 Being poor in Byzantium
Chris Wickham
Part I: Working Lives
3 Who ate all the pepper? Consumers and consumables in the Mediterranean c.
AD 1-800
Rebecca Darley
4 Individual or collective? Stucco-workers in Middle and Late Byzantine
construction sites.
Flavia Vanni
5 No lilies of the field: Teens and children at work
Cecily Hennessy
Part II: The Material World in Life and Death
6 Trickling down, trickling up, and holding things together with crossed
diagonals
Eunice Dauterman Maguire
7 The reactions of the (relatively) poor to the art of the elite
Henry Maguire
8 Hierarchy, economy, piety: Late Antique funerary textiles from Egypt in
context
Anna C. Kelley
Part III: The Stratification of Space
9 Competitive piety: Rural patrons in Byzantine Arabia and Palaestina,
c.500-c.630
Daniel Reynolds
10 Contextualizing secular representations in Marathos, Mani
Mark Pawlowski
11 The Poor shall eat and be satisfied: the ideal of Christian poverty in
the refectories of Constantinople
Jessica Varsallona
Part IV: Philanthropy and Social Obligation
12 Poverty, imperial philanthropy, and political ideology in the historical
accounts of Michael Psellos and Michael Attaleiates
Francisco Lopez Santos-Kornberger
13 Fraudulent beggars and fake monks: unease about almsgiving in Late
Antiquity
Jaclyn Maxwell
14 Charity begins at the monastery: Elite female philanthropy in the
Palaiologan Period
Lauren Wainwright
15 Poor in this world but not in the next? The commemoration of the Dead
among the Byzantine non-elite (ca. 300-1100)
Zachary Chitwood
Conclusion
16 Looking for the poor in Byzantium: an epilogue
Leslie Brubaker
Anna C. Kelley is Lecturer in Ancient History in the School of Classics at the University of St Andrews (UK). She received her PhD from the University of Birmingham (UK) and has held research fellowships at the Institute for Historical Research at the School of Advanced Study, University of London (UK), Dumbarton Oaks (USA), and the University of St Andrews (UK).
Flavia Vanni is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Newcastle University (UK). She received her PhD from the University of Birmingham (UK) and previously held a Richard Bradford McConnell Studentship at the British School at Athens (Greece) and Junior Research fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks (USA). She is also a grant recipient of the Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture at Hellenic College Holy Cross (USA).
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