Routledge Handbook of the Modern Reception of Byzantium

The Routledge Handbook of the Modern Reception of Byzantium provides a systematic and comprehensive commentary on the various ways that Byzantium has been responded to in the modern world and introduces the reader to areas of Byzantine not covered to date through its international case studies.

Most studies dealing with the modern reception of Byzantium focus on its role in the formation of national or European identities, or as an exotic ‘other,’ without covering the various spheres of culture, beyond history writing and literature, within which the reception of Byzantium may be discerned. This Handbook responds to the need perceived by scholars and students for a publication that brings definition and clarity to this growing field of Byzantine studies. The volume is structured around seven thematic sections – histories, politics, architecture, art, display, literature, and embodied and performative culture – each opened by a substantial conceptual essay from a leading scholar, and expanded through focused case studies that range geographically from China and Argentina to Ukraine, Ethiopia and the Greek diaspora in the United States. Together, forty-nine contributions from an internationally distinguished roster of scholars illuminate Byzantium as a polysemic signifier: from decadence and bureaucratic complexity to spiritual purity, creative reinvention and nationalist aspiration. Richly illustrated and expansive in scope, the volume gives particular attention to receptions long inaccessible to an English-speaking audience, correcting the field's historic privileging of Western European perspectives.

An essential reference work for researchers, lecturers and students, the Handbook will be indispensable across Byzantine studies, art history, architecture, cultural history, political thought, literary studies, film, and heritage studies.

Niamh Bhalla is Assistant Dean, Associate Professor of Art History and Director for Belonging at Northeastern University, London, UK. Specialising in early Christian and Byzantine art and architecture, and their modern revivals, her work engages with the lived experience of art and visual and material theology. She is the author of Experiencing the Last Judgement (Routledge, 2021) and Newman University Church, Dublin: Architectural revivalism in the British Isles and the authority of form (2024).

Dimitra Kotoula is a Curator at the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and teaches Byzantine Art History and Archaeology at College Year in Athens based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. Her research focuses on modern receptions of Byzantium, issues of form and function in Byzantine art, with particular emphasis on eschatology, as well as post-Byzantine networks of humanism, artistic exchanges and the post-Byzantine icon.