Essays On Music In The Byzantine World

Notably, Adam Goldwyn argues that Greek laments for the fallen city helped forge a new identity for Constantinopolitan refugees in Venice.

Immediate and tragic loss, as well as prestigious cultural heritage positioned them advantageously even against the long-standing Greek community established there as a result of Venetian trade and colonialism.

In spite of its biases and its meagre size, however, Hussey's history is worth reading for anyone eager to learn more about Byzantium, and copies are still available economically.

I came to this book as a lover of Byzantine art, hoping to learn more about the culture which made those brilliant mosaics, incredible churches, exquisite enamels, and unbelievable metalwork.

Alongside established scholars’ contributions, texts from emerging Byzantinists and modernists gain international exposure; we are also introduced to surprising evidence from unexpected sites, and invited to consider Byzantium outside its geographical and chronological borders.

I see many of the essays as ideal course readings that can be assigned to a wide range of post-graduate students interested in any area of Byzantine Studies, reception and cultural heritage, nation-building strategies, or colonialism and postcolonial theory.At the end, Constantinople was, basically, a country consisting of only the city itself.Of course, covering a thousand years of history in 165 pages also means that the the book onl This is a fairly short book with only 165 pages of actual content.The brevity of this book--a thousand years in 80 pages--makes its history extremely fast-paced. Some of the interest is in how Hussey (or her editors) can condense so much time into such a small space.For one thing, she writes about heretical movements (hesychasm, Bogomils) and their political impact without explaining, even in a phrase, what their heresy consisted of.The layman wanting to know Byzantium political history in any real depth would do better to get John Julian Norwich's three-volume history of Byzantium beginning with BYZANTIUM: The Early Centuries.However, one of the most frequent complaints against Norwich's books are that they focus almost entirely on the changing aristocracy and on foreign policy, and neglect the state of the commoners and Byzantium's cultural output. There are chapters on everyday life, learning and literature, Byzantine art, and the religious practices of the laity.The author, however, writes as if the findings of the Ecumenical Councils were arbitrary developments instead of the defence of right and traditional Christian doctrines, and she questions the actions of some whom the Church has glorified as saints.She even seems to accept some of the accusations made in Procopius' SECRET HISTORY, which few historians would do.Surprisingly good survey of the more or less one thousand years of Byzantine history packed into fewer than two hundred pages of text. Two maps as end papers - the classic choices for a book of a certain age- Justinian's conquests and the territorial reorganisation of the later empire. It is a brief survey of the whole of Byzantium history from Constantine the Great to its end with the invasion of the Ottoman Turks in 1453. Important figures like Justinian and Heraclius get just one or two pages, and many interesting events are missing. Hussey's THE BYZANTINE WORLD first appeared in the Hutchinson University Library in 1957, with new material added to editions in 1961, 1967, and 1970.