IMC 2009: Sessions

Session 110: Political Culture in the Latin West, Byzantine, and Islamic Spheres: Righteous Peoples and Errant Outsiders, I

Monday 13 July 2009, 11.15-12.45

Sponsor:	Society for the Medieval Mediterranean
Organiser:	Jonathan Shepard, Independent Scholar, Oxford
Moderator/Chair:	Thomas Brown, School of History, Classics & Archaeology, University of Edinburgh
Paper 110-a	New Portraits of Old Adversaries: The Image of Islam in the Hagiography of Maiolus of Cluny (Language: English) Scott G. Bruce, Department of History, University of Colorado, Boulder Index terms: Hagiography, Historiography - Medieval, Language and Literature - Latin, Monasticism
Paper 110-b	Religious Belief and Diplomacy in 10th-Century Byzantium: The Correspondence of Patriarch Nicholas I Mystikos (Language: English) Claudia Ludwig, Prosopographie der mittelbyzantinischen Zeit, Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin Index terms: Byzantine Studies, Ecclesiastical History, Politics and Diplomacy
Paper 110-c	How to Use and Abuse a Greek Monk: Greek Monks in Early 11th-Century Rome (Language: English) Greg Landels, Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman & Modern Greek Studies, Department of Classics, Ancient History & Archaeology, University of Birmingham Index terms: Byzantine Studies, Monasticism, Politics and Diplomacy
Paper 110-d	Hard on Heretics, Light on Latins: The Orthodoxy of Alexios I Komnenos (Language: English) Jonathan Shepard, Independent Scholar, Oxford Index terms: Byzantine Studies, Ecclesiastical History, Politics and Diplomacy
Abstract	Our prime concern is with the ways in which the authorities within each sphere defined their orthodoxy in relationship to the beliefs, ideology, and practices of the other spheres, especially in overt antithesis to them. In other words, we shall be considering how far regimes could gain or maintain a reputation for religious orthodoxy and thus political legitimacy through stirring up or leading opposition to the beliefs of 'Latins', 'Greeks', 'Saracens', or other errant outsiders. The one could gain in self-definition and self-righteousness and a kind of self-sealant commonality through identifying and indicting the defects of the other, sometimes to the death.