Byzantine Style, Religion, and Civilization: In Honour of Sir Steven Runciman (review)

Byzantine Style, Religion and Civilization: In Honour of Sir Steven Runciman is a collection of twenty-two specialized and eclectic and disparate contributions in addition to a bibliography of Runciman's publications and biographical essay and a very judicious and sensitive appreciation, "James Cochran Stevenson Runciman 1903–2000," by Antony M. Bryer (pp. xxxix–lv). This is a posthumous tribute, for Runciman died in 2000. Elizabeth M. Jeffreys has performed a fine yet challenging task of editing the text. The papers do not form any coherent whole, for their authors have come together from very diverse specialties and perspectives to honor Runciman. The volume contains seventy-nine plates or figures, in addition to a photograph of the honored historian. They originated at a conference in Scotland in honor of his ninetieth birthday on May 21–23, 1993. Probably some of the original participants were no longer surviving when what became a memorial volume finally appeared in 2007, and some others are too young to have participated in that conference fourteen years ago. I can add a few supplementary details to Bryer's essay with respect to Runciman at the University of Chicago. Here he lectured for the first time in 1962. In the following year, 1963 (April), he was Alexander White Visiting Professor in the Department of History. Departmental records show that he gave six lectures between April 2 and 18 on "Personal Contacts between Christians and Moslems in the Middle Ages." He gave lectures at the University of Chicago on at least three other occasions during my own appointment at that institution. Here he always attracted a large and favorable audience for the lectures that he delivered in an accomplished and magisterial style. Style was part of his presentation. His visits were always welcome and much appreciated and informative. He loved to travel. Dinner conversations with him during his visits were always stimulating. I can recall one in which he talked about his conversation with Yeats about the origins of "Sailing to Byzantium." His outstanding student was the late Donald Nicol, a fellow Cantabridgian, who observed to me in a letter that some of his own books, most notably Last Centuries of Byzantium, were "Runcimanesque." I shall leave consideration of the papers by art historians such as Brubaker and Buckton and archaeologists such as Megaw, Dunn, and Winfield to others who are more qualified than I. Among the contributions, the following are especially interesting and useful: the valuable update by John Haldon, "'Greek Fire' Revisited: Recent and Current Research" (pp. 290–325); Catherine Holmes, "Constantinople in the Reign of Basil II" (pp. 326–39), Jonathan Shepard, "Manners Maketh Romans? Young Barbarians at the Emperor's Court" (pp. 135–58), and the erudite detective work of Tim Greenwood, "The Discovery of the Relics of St. Grigor and the Development of Armenian Tradition in Ninth-Century Byzantium" (pp. 177–81). Most of the contributors discuss Byzantine and related topics. Although the very significant contribution of Runciman to the history of Crusades is well known and indeed is mentioned in Bryer's tribute, in fact this specific collection of contributions does not contain much on the Crusades, with the exception of Frank R. Trombley's paper "Armed Pilgrimage and the Reign of the Anti-Christ: Steven Runciman and the Origins of the First Crusade"(pp. 253–72). Noteworthy also is "A Short Piece of Narrative History: War and Diplomacy in the Balkans, Winter 921/2–spring 924," by James Howard-Johnston (pp. 340–60). Patricia Karlin Hayter illumines some of the obscurity about the termination of the second iconoclastic controversy with her essay "Restoration of Orthodoxy, the Pardon of Theophilos and the Acta Davidis, Symeonis et Georgii" (pp. 361–73). The volume contains an index and is beautifully printed. It honors an author who brought distinction and significant royalties to Cambridge University Press throughout his life. I have the impression that he would have liked this volume...