The imperial court in Constantinople has been central to the outsider’s vision of Byzantium. However, in spite of its fame in literature and scholarship, there have been few attempts to analyze the Byzantine court in its entirety as a phenomenon. The studies in this volume aim to provide a unified composition by presenting Byzantine courtly life in all its interconnected facets.

One important theme that unites these studies is the attention paid to describing the effects of a change in the social makeup of the court during this period and the reflection of these changes in art and architecture. These changes in social composition, mentality, and material culture of the court demonstrate that, as in so many other aspects of Byzantine civilization, the image of permanence and immutability projected by the forms of palace life was more apparent than real. As this new work shows, behind the golden facade of ceremony, rhetoric, and art, there was constant development and renewal.

Scarcely any object was as ubiquitous in Byzantine culture as the cross. This exhibition catalogue focuses on the figural processional cross, and the examples here provide opportunity to consider the various functions such crosses served in the imperial, ecclesiastic, military, and private sphere for both men and women.

Only in the last decade has much serious attention been paid to the Byzantine garden, so indirect is the mass of information, both in literature and the visual arts, that is available for scholars. Byzantine Garden Culture, based on papers delivered at a colloquium at Dumbarton Oaks, is the first book devoted to the subject.

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.

Written by specialists in several disciplines, this volume explores the parameters and significance of magic in Byzantine society, from the fourth century to after the empire's fall. The authors address a wide variety of questions, some of which are common to all historical research into magic, and some of which are peculiar to the Byzantine context.

The authors reveal the scope, the forms, and the functioning of magic in Byzantine society, throwing light on a hitherto relatively little-known aspect of Byzantine culture, and, at the same time, expanding upon the contemporary debates concerning magic and its roles in pre-modern societies.

This book introduces the great civilization of Byzantium and shows the centrality of Byzantium’s role in world history. It also celebrates the founding by Robert Woods Bliss and Mildred Bliss of one of the major institutions devoted to the study of that civilization, the Byzantine Center at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C.

Through seven interrelated chapters, which were originally given as lectures at two meetings held in Washington in 1990 and 1991 to honor the fiftieth anniversary of Dumbarton Oaks, the contributors demonstrate the place of Byzantine civilization in world history—both Eastern and Western. At the same time, they show the place of Dumbarton Oaks in interpreting that civilization for what its founders called “an everchanging present.”

The first essay, written by Milton Anastos, a scholar who first came to Dumbarton Oaks in 1941, one year after the founding of the Byzantine Center, is devoted to the institution itself and to the role that it has played in Byzantine Studies over the past fifty years. The four following chapters, by Speros Vryonis, Dimitri Obolensky, Irfan Shahîd, and Angeliki Laiou, discuss the relationships between Byzantium and its neighboring civilizations, Islamic, Slavic, and Western European, and display the great legacy that Byzantium left to those cultures. The two final essays, by Gary Vikam and Henry Maguire, present Byzantine art, today the best known aspect of Byzantine achievement, and discuss its reception by modern critics and historians.

This catalogue focuses on numismatic gold jewelry, from pendants set with coins and medallions to stamped pseudo-medallions, or a combination of both. Special attention is given to the technical issues of mounting techniques.

Founded in 1941, the annual journal Dumbarton Oaks Papers is dedicated to the publication of articles relating to late antique, early medieval, and Byzantine civilization in the fields of art and architecture, history, archaeology, literature, theology, law, and auxiliary disciplines.

In this issue: Alexander Sarantis, “War and Diplomacy in Pannonia and the Northwest Balkans during the Reign of Justinian: The Gepid Threat and Imperial Responses”; Peter Hatlie, “Images of Motherhood and Self in Byzantine Literature”; Maria Evangelatou, “Liturgy and the Illustration of the Ninth-Century Marginal Psalters”; Henry Maguire, “Ivories as Pilgrimage Art: A New Frame for the ‘Frame Group’”; Vasileios Marinis, “Tombs and Burials in the Monastery tou Libos in Constantinople”; and three fieldwork reports: “Second Report on the Excavation in the Monastery of Apa Shenute (Dayr Anba Shinuda) at Suhag,” by Peter Grossman, Darlene L. Brooks Hedstrom, and Saad Mohamad Mohamad Osman, with a contribution by Hans-Christoph Noeske; “To Live and Die in a Turbulent Era: Bioarchaeological Analysis of the Early Byzantine (6th–7th Centuries AD) Population from Sourtara Galaniou Kozanis (Northern Greece),” by Chryssi Bourbou; and “Study and Restoration of the Zeyrek Camii in Istanbul: Second Report, 2001–2005,” by Robert Ousterhout, Zeynep Ahunbay, and Metin Ahunbay.

The era of late antiquity—from the middle of the third century to the end of the eighth—was marked by the rise of two world religions, unprecedented political upheavals that remade the map of the known world, and the creation of art of enduring glory. In these eleven in-depth essays, drawn from the award-winning reference work Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World, an international cast of experts provides essential information and fresh perspectives on this period's culture and history.

This publication brings to a wider audience important new findings in the fields of medieval pottery and archaeometry. After a long period of dormancy, the study of Byzantine pottery has flourished in recent years. At the same time, the discipline of archaeometry has also undergone a rapid expansion. The combining of these two areas of research creates both opportunities and questions.

The new data that materials analysis provides about Byzantine ceramics and their production at times supports, modifies, and even contradicts conclusions derived from traditional archaeological methods. This new ability to determine the technique and provenance of Byzantine pottery has important implications well beyond the study of the material culture itself; it engages with broader historical issues, such as pilgrimage, economic relationships, and the transfer of ceramic technologies from the Islamic world to Byzantium and from Byzantium to Italy.

The church of San Marco of Venice has long played a central role in Venetian political, ceremonial, and religious life. Its renowned assemblage of mosaics, sculpture, metalwork, and reliquaries are, in origin, Roman, Byzantine, Venetian, or Venetian imitation of Byzantine designs. In San Marco, Byzantium, and the Myths of Venice, the authors assess the significance of the embellishment of the church and its immediate surroundings, especially during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when most of the Byzantine material was acquired, largely from Constantinople. The church and its decoration are studied in relation to Venice’s interests abroad and on mainland Italy. The authors address the diverse styles, sources, meanings, and significance of this art, both individually and as an ensemble.

Building upon developments in scholarship since Otto Demus’s masterly studies of the church, the book offers new insights into the inspiration, purposes, and mutability of San Marco and the myths that inspired and motivated Venetians.