Searching for identities: a meeting of text and material culture in the Byzantine Life Course CE 1204-1453

Novasio, Stephanie (2022). Searching for identities: a meeting of text and material culture in the Byzantine Life Course CE 1204-1453. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

This thesis offers the first examination of the Life Course in the late Byzantine period (1204-1453). The past decade of scholarship has demonstrated that representations of every stage of life – infancy, childhood, adolescence, maturity, and old age – can be found in Byzantine texts and visual culture. However, few scholars have examined representations of ageing across the Life Course, though social scientists have demonstrated that it is the transitions from one life-stage to the next that essentially define the process of growing up and growing old. By examining Byzantine authors’ and artisans’ portrayals of ageing across the Life Course, we may come to understand the importance of age as a component of both identity and of the structure of Byzantine society at large.

This study takes as its chronological point of departure the year of the Latin conquest of Constantinople in 1204 and ends with the Ottoman conquest of 1453. This late period of Byzantine history, due in part to the altered nature of the source material after 1204, remains underrepresented in existing scholarship of ageing and the family. Nevertheless, in this thesis I demonstrate that the late Byzantine period offers a rich array of evidence, including biographical literature, visual portrayals of the life-stages, and burial archaeology, from which we can understand how the Byzantines constructed the Life Course during a rapidly fluctuating and dynamic period of the empire’s history.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):