Fw: 42nd Annual Walton Lecture - Byzantium as Roman, Greek and Christian

[Roland Moore]

From: American School of Classical Studies at Athens <as...@ascsa.org>

Subject: 42nd Annual Walton Lecture - Byzantium as Roman, Greek and Christian

The Gennadius Library of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens is pleased to invite you to the 42nd Annual Walton Lecture Byzantium as Roman, Greek and Christian Maria Mavroudi University of California, Berkeley Tuesday, May 20, 2025 7:00pm (Greece) | 12:00pm (U.S. EDT) Cotsen Hall 9 Anapiron Polemou Street, 106 76 Athens & online *The lecture will be in English Ελληνικά / Greek Adequately discussing the Roman, Greek, and Christian aspects of Byzantium (how they were experienced by the Byzantines during a millennium, how other medieval civilizations and modernity perceived these qualities in Byzantine culture) would be a book-length (and perhaps multivolume) project. A humble alternative is attempted here, in an effort to squeeze large topics within the confines of a lecture: a text foundational to the establishment of Byzantine studies as a modern academic discipline towards the end of the nineteenth century is used as a mirror of the field at that time, especially regarding a limited number of major and recurring topics in the modern historiography of Byzantium: its periodization, Roman self-identification, Christian identity, and relationship with the ancient Greek past. What is found there is compared with how twenty-first century scholarship approached the same questions. Some implications of the convergencies and differences for the present and future of the field are also drawn. Join on Zoom Watch on YouTube Maria Mavroudi studied Philology at the University of Thessaloniki, her native city, and earned a Ph.D. in Byzantine studies at Harvard. Her scholarly work began by focusing on a tenth-century Byzantine book on dream interpretation that had been generally viewed as a Byzantine invention partly based on the second-century manual of Artemidorus; she showed that it was a Christian adaptation of Arabic Islamic material. She subsequently worked on identifying the place of similar translations of texts originally written in Arabic or Persian within Byzantine literary culture and its reception in “East” and “West’ during the medieval and early modern period. To do so, she had to reconsider the position of the ancient Greek classics within the Byzantine, Arabic, and Latin intellectual traditions, as well as the supposed marginality of Byzantium within a broader medieval intellectual universe. Her work was recognized with a MacArthur fellowship in 2002. Mavroudi is Professor of Byzantine History at the University of California, Berkeley, with additional appointments at the departments of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies and Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures. FOLLOW THE GENNADIUS LIBRARY SUPPORT THE GENNADIUS LIBRARY GIVE SUBSCRIBE TO OUR E-NEWSLETTER SUBSCRIBE

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