The concept of a prosperous late antique eastern Mediterranean has become well-established in scholarship. Lycia (Turkey) is considered to be one such prosperous region in particular. This article questions the notion of ‘prosperity’ and its application to the Lycian region and argues that only certain coastal areas experienced what might be considered ‘prosperity’ in this period. Moreover, it is argued that some settlements, specifically those of the interior, did not experience ‘prosperity’, but may have even declined. Thus, a generalized application of ‘prosperity’ should be approached with caution as it masks nuances in the settlement development and economy of micro-regions.

The scholia to the canonical manuscripts of the Collection in Fifty Titles and Collection in Fourteen Titles serve as an excellent case study in the potentials of marginalia to illuminate historical narratives and broaden our understanding of how the Byzantines encountered and read their traditional texts. This article explores these potentials by a) offering an overview and taxonomy of the canonical scholia; b) (re)discovering a Macedonian ‘proto-commentator’ hiding in plain sight in the margins of one manuscript; c) sketching some of the scholia's hermeneutic particularities in comparison to the twelfth-century canonical commentaries.

This paper draws attention to the twelfth-century French romance Partonopeus de Blois and its author's original use of the name ‘Byzantium’ instead of conventional ‘Greek’ or ‘Constantinopolitan Empire’. It investigates roots of the modern-day belief that the term has been applied as a designation of the medieval state only since the sixteenth century. A linguistic and literary analysis challenges the premise and explores possible scenarios of the name's introduction into the Old French text. A suggested interpretation de-emphasizes the popular east-west ideological context in favour of simpler story-telling concerns.

For John Duffy

This article explores the fate of the Stone of Unction — the marble slab upon which, according to tradition, the dead body of Christ had been anointed for burial — in twelfth-century Byzantium. Focusing upon the Stone's association with Manuel I Komnenos, the article examines the imperial handling of this Passion relic in relation to broader trends in the devotional culture of the contemporary Byzantine élite. The special bond between the emperor and the relic, it is argued, should be seen as a manifestation of the pervasive desire, much in evidence during the Komnenian era, to personalise and even privatise the sacred.

This article focuses on what hitherto unpublished land grant documents from the Malta archives of the Order of St John tell us about the countryside of Rhodes during the fourteenth century. In so doing, an attempt is made to discern trends in various aspects of these land grants, utilizing quantitative weightings where possible. We see that the relationship between the Latins and the Greeks in fourteenth century Rhodes was on the whole amicable and mutually rewarding. The countryside of Rhodes appears to have enjoyed one of the more harmonious relationships between Latins and Greeks to be found in the post-1204 Byzantine world.

This case-study concerns Greek Aristotelianism in the seventeenth century. More specifically, my article deals with the impact of neo-Aristotelianism upon the formation of the philosophical curriculum of the Greek-speaking world during that period. I examine aspects of the – rather understudied – influence exerted by Cesare Cremonini on Theophilos Korydalleus. The terms ‘authentic interpreters’/‘authentic interpretation’ and ‘νεώτεροι’ in Theophilos’ works of natural philosophy not only highlight the influence of Cremonini, but also hint at critical views held by the former, as well as terminology which is either absent or has a different meaning in treatises of the latter.

This essay examines the metaphorical use of musical terms in Greek aesthetic discourse during the interwar period by illuminating a crucial yet neglected moment in the reception of anti-rationalistic philosophical and aesthetic tendencies that had greatly influenced European modernist literature since the late nineteenth century. In particular, it points out the ways the reception of Bergsonian theories in Greece co-determined the formation of a new concept of Modern Greek narrative fiction, clearing the ground for the first modernist attempts to ‘musicalize’ fiction. The essay thus proposes a broader perception of the term ‘musicalization’ than the mere imitation of musical techniques in narrative texts, since the aesthetic discourse features not only actual music but also ‘music’ as an aesthetic category synonymous with transcendence, ambiguity and fluidity.