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Approaching Social Hierarchies in Byzantium: Dialogues Between Rich and Poor book cover

1st Edition

Approaching Social Hierarchies in Byzantium Dialogues Between Rich and Poor

Edited By Anna C. Kelley, Flavia Vanni Copyright 2025
354 Pages 67 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

354 Pages 67 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

354 Pages 67 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
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,... Read more

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 Contextualising 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

Biography

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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