The Politics of Byzantine Studies: Between Nations and Empires

Byzantine studies is neither the oldest nor the largest of the historical disciplines, but it is among the oddest.Its peculiarities, however, are rarely discussed by its practitioners, nor have they been much noted by intellectual historians.The appearance in recent years of multiple book-length studies of the discipline and its histories is therefore welcome.The quality of the three works here reviewed is such that each simultaneously complements and complicates the image presented by the others.The resulting view, if still far from complete, is nevertheless much greater than the sum of the parts.Three peculiarities stand out especially, each closely related to the others.The first is the discipline's distinctive multinational constellation.The International Association of Byzantine Studies is composed of some thirty-nine national committees, 1 including twenty-four current NATO members, five former Soviet republics and four Soviet-aligned satellite states.The oldest centres for Byzantine research in the Western world are located at the heart of historic institutions of educational privilege: in Washington DC (Dumbarton Oaks, administered by Harvard