Series: Dumbarton Oaks Studies

Christians had always been concerned, since the faith's inception, about the relationship between violence and belief. In Byzantium, this tension was explored not only in abstract theological texts but in the songs people sang: hymns, a multivalent, fluid form of devotion that served as the meeting place between theological conviction and lived religious experience. Sacralizing Violence in Byzantium is the...

In the late eleventh century, Ethiopian masons hewed great cruciform churches out of mountains in the eastern highlands of Tigray, Ethiopia's northernmost province. Hitherto unparalleled in scale, these monuments were royal foundations, instruments of political centralization and re-Christianization that anticipated the great thirteenth-century churches at Lalibela. Bastions of the Cross, the first study devoted to the subject, examines the cruciform...

Leo's firsthand experience of the campaigns and courts of two Byzantine emperors provides vivid descriptions of sieges, pitched battles, and ambushes. His account of the conspiracy against Nikephoros II Phokas, murdered as he slept on the floor in front of his icons, is one of the most dramatic in Byzantine narrative histories. Alice-Mary Talbot and Denis Sullivan, with the assistance...

Bouttios and Late Antique Antioch undertakes the exciting, if laborious, task of assembling clues and piecing back together a book that has disappeared from our library of Greek and Roman works. But it does not merely add another author to the bibliography of antiquity and place him in fourth-century Antioch. It shows how the gods could be reduced to historical...

Cappadocia, a picturesque volcanic region of central Anatolia, preserves the best evidence of daily life in the Byzantine Empire and yet remains remarkably understudied, better known to tourists than to scholars. The area preserves an abundance of physical remains: at least a thousand rock-cut churches or chapels, of which more than one-third retain significant elements of their painted decoration, as...