Outlandish Knight: The Byzantine Life of Steven Runciman by Minoo Dinshaw (review)
- Outlandish Knight: The Byzantine Life of Steven Runciman by Minoo Dinshaw
Many times honored (the more exotic the honor, the better) and much published, the Byzantine historian Steven Runciman remains something of a mystery. He lived the gilded life of one who has been everywhere and met everyone and was the intimate of royalty in several countries. He belonged to the heady and largely homosexual social set at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the 1920s. A fellowship followed (one of his pupils was Guy Burgess, who defected to the Soviet Union in 1951), but Runciman resigned from it when he came into an inheritance. Thereafter his was the life of a gentleman scholar living on a Scottish island and then in a border tower, punctuated by frequent travel to interesting places. By the time he died at the age of 97 in 2000, he had published sixteen books, most of them on Byzantium and most still widely read. He wrote with an elegance, style, and panache that brought Byzantium to a wide readership at a time when it was little studied, and his three-volume History of the Crusades, with its sympathetic treatment of the role of Byzantium, stood as a corrective to the hitherto dominant Western medievalist tradition of Crusader studies.
Though never a career academic, Runciman was the doyen of Byzantine studies in the United Kingdom and set a pattern of narrative history filled with personal details and romantic evocation. But given Runciman's private means, his penchant for travel, and his royal and aristocratic friendships, Dinshaw's 640 pages of text do not explain what impelled him to produce a long series of books on seemingly obscure topics. A spell in Istanbul and Athens during and just after World War II, and Runciman's own tendency to give variant versions of episodes in his life, add to the puzzle. Many of Dinshaw's chapters are headed with the names of tarot cards, which had caught Runciman's interest at an early stage. But Dinshaw admits that he still finds this highly social and yet also intensely private man hard to understand fully. [End Page 545]
Dame Averil Cameron, professor of late antique and Byzantine history at Oxford University and a fellow of the British Academy, was warden of Keble College, Oxford, from 1994 to 2010. Currently president of the Council for British Research in the Levant and chair of the Oxford Center for Byzantine Research, she is the author of Procopius and the Sixth Century; Byzantine Matters; The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity, AD 395–700; Dialoguing in Late Antiquity; Arguing It Out; and (as coeditor) Doctrine and Debate in the East Christian World, 300–1500; Late Antiquity on the Eve of Islam: The Formation of Classical Islam; and volumes 13 and 14 of the Cambridge Ancient History.
