From Byzantium To Italy

Download or read book From Byzantium to Italy written by N. G. Wilson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-11-17 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Which famous poet treasured his copy of Homer, but could never learn Greek? What prompted diplomats to circulate a speech by Demosthenes – in Latin translation – when the Turks threatened to invade Europe? Why would enthusiastic Florentines crowd a lecture on the Roman Neoplatonist Plotinus, but underestimate the importance of Plato himself? Having all but disappeared during the Middle Ages, classical Greek would recover a position of importance – eventually equal to that of classical Latin - only after a series of surprising failures, chance encounters, and false starts. This important study of the rediscovery and growing influence of classical Greek scholarship in Italy from the 14th to the early 16th centuries is brought up to date in a new edition that reflects on the recent developments in the field of classical reception studies, and contains fully up-to-date references to aid students and scholars. From a leading authority on Greek palaeography in the English-speaking world, here is a complete account of the historic rediscovery of Greek philosophy, language and literature during the Renaissance, brought up-to-date for a modern audience of classicists, historians, and students and scholars of reception studies and the Classical Tradition.

Download or read book A Companion to Byzantine Italy written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-02-01 with total page 847 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a collection of essays on Byzantine Italy which provides a fresh synthesis of current research as well as new insights on various aspects of its local societies from the 6th to the 11th century.

Download or read book Sailing from Byzantium written by Colin Wells and published by Bantam. This book was released on 2008-12-10 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gripping intellectual adventure story, Sailing from Byzantium sweeps you from the deserts of Arabia to the dark forests of northern Russia, from the colorful towns of Renaissance Italy to the final moments of a millennial city under siege…. Byzantium: the successor of Greece and Rome, this magnificent empire bridged the ancient and modern worlds for more than a thousand years. Without Byzantium, the works of Homer and Herodotus, Plato and Aristotle, Sophocles and Aeschylus, would never have survived. Yet very few of us have any idea of the enormous debt we owe them. The story of Byzantium is a real-life adventure of electrifying ideas, high drama, colorful characters, and inspiring feats of daring. In Sailing from Byzantium, Colin Wells tells of the missionaries, mystics, philosophers, and artists who against great odds and often at peril of their own lives spread Greek ideas to the Italians, the Arabs, and the Slavs. Their heroic efforts inspired the Renaissance, the golden age of Islamic learning, and Russian Orthodox Christianity, which came complete with a new alphabet, architecture, and one of the world’s greatest artistic traditions. The story’s central reference point is an arcane squabble called the Hesychast controversy that pitted humanist scholars led by the brilliant, acerbic intellectual Barlaam against the powerful monks of Mount Athos led by the stern Gregory Palamas, who denounced “pagan” rationalism in favor of Christian mysticism. Within a few decades, the light of Byzantium would be extinguished forever by the invading Turks, but not before the humanists found a safe haven for Greek literature. The controversy of rationalism versus faith would continue to be argued by some of history’s greatest minds. Fast-paced, compulsively readable, and filled with fascinating insights, Sailing from Byzantium is one of the great historical dramas–the gripping story of how the flame of civilization was saved and passed on.

Download or read book Greece Reinvented written by Han Lamers and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-11-16 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Greece Reinvented discusses the transformation of Byzantine Hellenism as the cultural elite of Byzantium, displaced to Italy, constructed it. It explores why and how Byzantine migrants such as Cardinal Bessarion, Ianus Lascaris, and Giovanni Gemisto adopted Greek personas to replace traditional Byzantine claims to the heirship of ancient Rome. In Greece Reinvented, Han Lamers shows that being Greek in the diaspora was both blessing and burden, and explores how these migrants’ newfound ‘Greekness’ enabled them to create distinctive positions for themselves while promoting group cohesion. These Greek personas reflected Latin understandings of who the Greeks ‘really’ were but sometimes also undermined Western paradigms. Greece Reinvented reveals some of the cultural tensions that bubble under the surface of the much-studied transmission of Greek learning from Byzantium to Italy.

Download or read book Byzantine Rome and the Greek Popes written by Andrew J. Ekonomou and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2007-01-26 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Byzantine Rome and the Greek Popes examines the scope and extent to which the East influenced Rome and the Papacy following the Justinian Reconquest of Italy in the middle of the sixth century through the pontificate of Zacharias and the collapse of the exarchate of Ravenna in 752. A combination of factors resulted in the arrival of significant numbers of easterners in Rome, and those immigrants had brought with them a number of eastern customs and practices previously unknown in the city. Greek influence became apparent in art, religious ceremonial and liturgics, sacred music, the rhetoric of doctrinal debate, the growth of eastern monastic communities, and charitable institutions, and the proliferation of the cults of eastern saints and ecclesiastical feast days and, in particular, devotion to the Theotokos or Mother of God. From the late seventh to the middle of the eighth century, eleven of the thirteen Roman pontiffs were the sons of families of eastern provenance. While conceding that over the course of the seventh century Rome indeed experienced the impact of an important Greek element, some scholars of the period have insisted that the degree to which Rome and the Papacy were 'orientalized' has been exaggerated, while others argue that the extent of their 'byzantinization' has not been fully appreciated. The question has also been raised as to whether Rome's oriental popes were responsible for sowing the seeds of separatism from Byzantium and laying the foundation for a future papal state, or whether they were loyal imperial subjects ever steadfast politically, although not always so in matters of the faith, to the reigning sovereign in Constantinople. Finally, there is the important issue of whether one could still speak of a single and undivided imperium Roman christianum in the seventh and early eighth centuries or whether the concept of imperial unity in the epoch following Gregory the Great was a quaint and fanciful fiction as East and West, ignoring and misunderstanding one another, began to go their separate ways. Byzantine Rome and the Greek Popes provides a guide through this complicated and often contradictory history.

Download or read book Byzantium and Venice written by Donald M. Nicol and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1992-05-07 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, the first of this scope to have been published, traces the diplomatic, cultural and commercial links between Constantinople and Venice from the foundation of the Venetian republic to the fall of the Byzantine Empire. It aims to show how, especially after the Fourth Crusade in 1204, the Venetians came to dominate first the Genoese and thereafter the whole Byzantine economy. At the same time the author points to those important cultural and, above all, political reasons why the relationship between the two states was always inherently unstable.

Download or read book From Rome to Byzantium written by Michael Grant and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-03-04 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Byzantium was dismissed by Gibbon, in the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,and his Victorian successors as a decadent, dark, oriental culture, given up to intrigue, forbidden pleasure and refined cruelty. This great empire, founded by Constantine as the seat of power in the East began to flourish in the fifth century AD, after the fall of Rome, yet its culture and history have been neglected by scholars in comparison to the privileging of interest in the Western and Roman Empire. Michael Grant's latest book aims to compensate for that neglect and to provide an insight into the nature of the Byzantine Empire in the fifth century; the prevalence of Christianity, the enormity and strangeness of the landscape of Asia Minor; and the history of invasion prior to the genesis of the empire. Michael Grant's narrative is lucid and colourful as always, lavishly illustrated with photographs and maps. He successfully provides an examination of a comparatively unexplored area and constructs the history of an empire which rivals the former richness and diversity of a now fallen Rome.