Individual essays discuss Byzantine conceptions of paradise, the textual evidence for monastic horticulture, animal and game parks, herbs in medicinal pharmacy, and the famous illustrated copy of Dioskorides's herbal manual in Vienna. An opening chapter explores questions and observations from the point of view of a non-Byzantine garden historian, and the closing chapter suggests possible directions for future scholarship in the field.

The Middle Ages was a time of great upheaval - the period between the seventh and fourteenth centuries saw great social, political and economic change. The radically distinct cultures of the Christian West, Byzantium, Persian-influenced Islam, and al-Andalus resulted in different responses to the garden arts of antiquity and different attitudes to the natural world and its artful manipulation. Yet these cultures interacted and communicated, trading plants, myths and texts. By the fifteenth century the garden as a cultural phenomenon was immensely sophisticated and a vital element in the way society saw itself and its relation to nature. A Cultural History of Gardens in the Medieval Age presents an overview of the period with essays on issues of design, types of gardens, planting, use and reception, issues of meaning, verbal and visual representation of gardens, and the relationship of gardens to the larger landscape.

Explores Byzantine perceptions of creation and different types of natural environments, and the principles underpinning such perceptions.

Byzantium was one of the longest-lasting empires in history. Throughout the millennium of its existence, the empire showed its capability to change and develop under very different historical circumstances. This remarkable resilience would have been impossible to achieve without the formation of a lasting imperial culture and a strong imperial ideological infrastructure. Imperial culture and ideology required, among other things, to sort out who was ʻinsiderʼ and who was ʻoutsiderʼ and develop ways to define and describe ones neighbours and interact with them. There is an indefinite number of possibilities for the exploration of relationships between Byzantium and its neighbours. The essays in this collection focus on several interconnected clusters of topics and shared research interests, such as the place of neighbours in the context of the empire and imperial ideology, the transfer of knowledge with neighbours, the Byzantine perception of their neighbours and the political relationship and/or the conflict with neighbours.

The Cult of St Anna in Byzantium is the first undertaking in Byzantine research to study the phenomenon of St Anna’s cult from the sixth to the fifteenth centuries. It was prompted by the need to enrich our knowledge of a female saint who had already been studied in the West but remained virtually unknown in Eastern Christendom. It focuses on a figure little-studied in scholarship and examines the formation, establishment and promotion of an apocryphal saint who made her way to the pantheon of Orthodox saints. Visual and material culture, relics and texts track the gradual social and ideological transformation of Byzantium from early Christianity until the fifteenth century. This book not only examines various aspects of early Christian and Byzantine civilisation, but also investigates how the cult of saints greatly influenced cultural changes in order to suit theological, social and political demands. The cult of St Anna influenced many diverse elements of Christian life in Constantinople, including the creation of sacred spaces and the location of haghiasmata (fountains of holy water) in the city; imperial patronage; the social reception of St Anna’s story; and relic narratives. This monograph breaks new ground in explaining how and why Byzantium and the Orthodox Church attributed scriptural authority to a minor figure known only from a non-canonical work.

Gardens: A Short History embraces the beauty and practicality of gardens, in history and culture across the world. Gordon Campbell also look at variations on the modern garden, including the suburban garden, the city garden, the guerrilla garden, and the vegetable garden, and considers the future of gardens.

Although the actual dreaming experience of the Byzantines lies beyond our reach, the remarkable number of dream narratives in the surviving sources of the period attests to the cardinal function of dreams as vehicles of meaning, and thus affords modern scholars access to the wider cultural fabric of symbolic representations of the Byzantine world. Whether recounting real or invented dreams, the narratives serve various purposes, such as political and religious agendas, personal aspirations or simply an author’s display of literary skill. It is only in recent years that Byzantine dreaming has attracted scholarly attention, and important publications have suggested the way in which Byzantines reshaped ancient interpretative models and applied new perceptions to the functions of dreams. This book - the first collection of studies on Byzantine dreams to be published - aims to demonstrate further the importance of closely examining dreams in Byzantium in their wider historical and cultural, as well as narrative, context. Linked by this common thread, the essays offer insights into the function of dreams in hagiography, historiography, rhetoric, epistolography, and romance. They explore gender and erotic aspects of dreams; they examine cross-cultural facets of dreaming, provide new readings, and contextualize specific cases; they also look at the Greco-Roman background and Islamic influences of Byzantine dreams and their Christianization. The volume provides a broad variety of perspectives, including those of psychoanalysis and anthropology.

Byzantine Childhood examines the intricacies of growing up in medieval Byzantium, children’s everyday experiences, and their agency. By piecing together a wide range of sources and utilising several methodological approaches inspired by intersectionality, history from below and microhistory, it analyses the life course of Byzantine boys and girls and how medieval Byzantine society perceived and treated them according to societal and cultural expectations surrounding age, gender, and status. Ultimately, it seeks to reconstruct a more plausible picture of the everyday life of children, one of the most vulnerable social groups throughout history and often a neglected subject in scholarship. Written in a lively and engaging manner, this book is necessary reading for scholars and students of Byzantine history, as well as those interested in the history of childhood and the family.

Animals have recently become recognized as significant agents of history as part of the ‘animal turn’ in historical studies. Animals in Byzantium were human companions, a source of entertainment and food – it is small wonder that they made their way into literature and the visual arts. Moreover, humans defined themselves and their activities by referring to non-human animals, either by anthropomorphizing animals (as in the case of the Cat-Mice War) or by animalizing humans and their (un)wanted behaviours. The Routledge Handbook of Human-Animal Relations in the Byzantine World offers an in-depth survey of the relationships between humans and non-human animals in the Byzantine Empire. The contributions included in the volume address both material (zooarchaeology, animals as food, visual representations of animals) and immaterial (semiotics, philosophy) aspects of human-animal coexistence in chapters written by leading experts in their field. This book will appeal to students and scholars alike researching Byzantine social and cultural history, as well as those interested in the history of animals. This book marks an important step in the development of animal studies in Byzantium, filling a gap in the wider research on the history of human-animal relations in the Middle Ages.

Daily life and living conditions in the Byzantine world are relatively underexplored subjects, often neglected in comparison with more visible aspects of Byzantine culture, such as works of art. The book is among the few publications on Greek Byzantine populations and helps pioneer a new approach to the subject, opening a window on health status and dietary patterns through the lens of bioarchaeological research. Drawing on a diversity of disciplines (biology, chemistry, archaeology and history), the author focuses on the complex interaction between physiology, culture and the environment in Byzantine populations from Crete in the 7th to 12th centuries. The systematic analysis and interpretation of the mortality profiles, the observed pathological conditions, and of the chemical data, all set in the cultural context of the era, brings new evidence to bear on the reconstruction of living conditions in Byzantine Crete. Individual chapters look at the demographic profiles and mortality patterns of adult and non-adult populations, and study dietary habits and breastfeeding and weaning patterns. In addition, this book provides an indispensable body of primary data for future research in these fields, and so furthers an interdisciplinary approach in tracing the health of the past populations.