Strangers to Themselves: The Byzantine Outsider, Papers from the Thirty-second Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, March 1998 (review)

274 Reviews understand its early modern piety, the piety of a distinctly protestant, even puritan, woman, makes this kind of scholarly annotation both desirable and necessary. Kim Walker School ofEnglish, Film and Theatre Victoria University of Wellingto Smythe, Dion C, ed., Strangers to Themselves: The Byzantine Outsider, Paper from the Thirty-second Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, March 1998 (Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies Publications 8), Aldershot, Ashgate/Variorum, 2000; cloth; pp. x, 269; 14 b/w illustrations; R R P £45.00; ISBN 0860788148. Commendably the annual British Byzantine Spring Symposia are now regularly published. In thefirstof 18 papers Margaret Mullett (Belfast) provides an introduction which balances theory with wide-ranging examples and many references to recent scholarly literature. Everyone is an outsider in relation to the networks of others, and definitions depend on the kind of labelling used. We, outsiders to Byzantium, must remember that w e are also 'strangers to ourselves'. The papers have been grouped primarily by subject matter, with four focusing on monasticism and one on the otherworld, four on distinct groups, women, Jews and traders,fiveon the provinces and the capital, and two on foreigners. Monasticism entails an act of detachment. McGuckin argues that this notion, deriving from Stoicism, was coupled by Evagrius Ponticus with silent reflection, while remaining a preliminary to authoritative discourse. For John Climacus xeniteia was only the third step on the ladder of ascent to the divine. Rutherford asks what doctrinal questions interested monastic communities outside of the Trinitarian and Christological issues. Her examples are the fifth-century Diadochos of Photike, concerned with the kinship of the soul with God and the practice of prayer, and the eleventh-century Paul, founder of the monastery of the Theotokos Evergetis monastery in Constantinople whose florilegium, based on the desert fathers and early writers on prayer, was for centuries a sourcebook for ascetics. What may appear to us mere topoi provided useful guidelines, Orthodoxy only a context. Jordan compares the Typikon of John, hegoumenos of the monastery of the Forerunner at an unknown Phoberou, with its model, the typikon of the monastery of the Theotokos Evergetis. John, who refounded his monastery in 1112, placed greater emphasis on fasting and the evils of sexual Reviews 275 temptation. Sevcenko sees the desert fathers from a new perspective, not as outsiders but as intruders into the world ofthe desert. Here they learnt to coexist with, and even have the companionship of, its animal population, including lions, s t i l l found then in Egypt, Palestine and Syria. Baun takes two texts of the Macedonian period, the Apocalypse of the Theotokos and theApocalypse ofAnastasia which significantly alter the late antique genre in which male Biblicalfiguresvisit the 'otherworld'. A woman, the Virgin, intercedes for the sinners, but Christ grants little or no respite from their gruesome punishments, the worst of which are reserved for corrupt government and ecclesiasticalfigures.This vision of hell would correspond to contemporary Byzantine prison conditions and the punishments, including mutilation, were already evident in the Ekloga and the laws of Basil I. The futile efforts of the Theotokos would indicate a desperate protest against the Byzantine penal code. Beaucamp covers ground she knows well, mustering the evidence of Byzantine canon law for women's exclusion from the priesthood, the sanctuary, even from the church during menstruation, and from communion during confinement. Canon law relating to w o m e n was framed from the point ofview ofthe man. de Lange examines the Byzantine Jews' sense of identity c.1000 to 1200. Indistinguishable, he believes, in appearance, they were subject to some legal restrictions and distinguished by their religiousritesand expanding Hebrew culture. lacobsohn describes the distinctive low two-storeyed tombs with half-cylinder 'roof found in 1994 in the old Jewish cemetery of Chalkis in Euboea and dating from across the Ottoman period. Earlier examples elsewhere lack the deep recess in the western, short end ofthe tomb concealing at the back an inscribed epitaph. Jacoby sees Byzantine traders paradoxically as outsiders within the Empire, since the Empire's elite considered trade a lowly occupation. But they were also outsiders because they lacked the privileges and exemptions granted to...