This book discusses social, religious and medical attitudes towards bathing in Late Antiquity. It examines the place of bathing in late Roman and early Byzantine society as seen in the literary, historical, and documentary sources from the late antique period. The author argues …
Though recent scholarship has investigated many aspects of the Virgin's cult in Byzantium, the Visitation has been entirely overlooked with respect to both its theological significance and its popularity in pre-iconoclastic art. My research examines textual sources such as bibli…
Niketas Byzantios was a Byzantine polemicist active in ninth-century Constantinople. His writings against Islam include two letters in response to an un-named Muslim intellectual and a general refutation of the Qur'an. Unlike earlier Byzantine anti-Islamic writers, Niketas does …
An extensive investigation of the acta of the sixth ecumenical council (680-81) in Constantinople, this study traces the intensified Byzantine use of patristic citations and the revival of imperial authority in the seventh century in the wake of the Islamic conquests and the maj…
This dissertation aims to analyze the geneses of “otherness” in intra-cultural and cross-cultural interactions and relations in late Byzantium and in the early Ottoman period with a special reference to the fourteenth century. The technologies of “otherness” or “otherization” ar…
Leprosy has afflicted humans for thousands of years. It wasn't until the twelfth century, however, that the dreaded disease entered the collective psyche of Western society, thanks to a frightening epidemic that ravaged Catholic Europe. The Church responded by constructing chari…