Saint George Between Empires: Image and Encounter in the Medieval East

This volume examines Saint Georges intertwined traditions in the competing states of the eastern Mediterranean and Transcaucasia, demonstrating how rival conceptions of this well-known saint became central to Crusader, Eastern Christian, and Islamic medieval visual cultures.

Saint George Between Empires links the visual cultures of Byzantium, North Africa, the Levant, Syria, and the Caucasus during the Crusader era to redraw our picture of interfaith relations and artistic networks. Heather Badamo recovers and recontextualizes a vast body of images and literaturefrom etiquette manuals and romances to miracle accounts and chroniclesto describe the history of Saint George during a period of religious and political fragmentation, between his rise to cross-cultural prominence in the eleventh century and his globalization in the fifteenth. In Badamos analysis, George emerges as an exemplar of cross-cultural encounter and global translation.

Featuring important new research on monuments and artworks that are no longer available to scholars as a result of the occupation of Syria and parts of Iraq, Saint George Between Empires will be welcomed by scholars of Byzantine, medieval, Islamic, and Eastern Christian art and cultural studies.