The Miracles of St Artemios, which reveal a catalogue of men who are in severe pain and who express their anguish volubly, are analysed to provide two methodological frameworks (anthropological and medical), within which to investigate the masculinity of these ‘ordinary’ Byzantine men.

This paper examines the way papal rhetoric made use of the image and reputation of the city of Constantinople in order to legitimise and incite support for its crusading calls for the defence of the Latin empire after 1204. A number of relevant themes that reflect the city’s temporal and religious importance are explored, such as its wealth, its relics, its imperial past and its patriarchal status as New Rome. The differences of emphasis and occasional omissions of such arguments provide insights as to what was expected to motivate the audience, while also revealing the papacy’s priorities.

This discussion reopens the file on Plethon’s purported stay in Ottoman territory in order to trace the origins of the Plethonean belief in sectarianism as a vehicle for attaining Utopian sociopolitical ends. In the first part, possible approaches to Plethon’s alleged study with the mysterious mentor Elissaios are considered. In the second part, an argument is presented that in both the changing Ottoman Empire and the disintegrating Byzantine Empire esoteric societies contemporaneously developed a potentially antinomian role. Just like Plethon’s ‘brothers’, the ‘Brethren of Purity’ of al-Bistami, Sheikh Bedreddin and Börklüce Mustafa opted for sectarianism in order to recover a supraconfessional religious law and construe a novel political identity. This indicates the probability of a common nexus between Rumelia, the Peloponnese and the Aegean spanning confessional lines and utilizing sect as the vehicle of utopianism.

An attempt is made here to consider ‘the Greek experience of Ottoman rule’ beyond the frontiers of the Empire itself, by focusing on the resilience of the Ottoman aspect of collective identity among the Greeks in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Marseille. Beyond the classic questioning of political, social and cultural categories and labels, this article makes a plea for taking this resilience seriously, as part and parcel of a broader process of identity formation in a diaspora context. Making the case for a richer and more complex analysis of the phenomenon of ‘entangled identities’ among the Greeks in Marseille, some suggestions are made for what this claim might bring to the analysis of identity formation in the context of diaspora communities.

A first attempt is made here to map the presence of the symbol of the statue in Ritsos’ short poems. Starting from his early work and reaching the years of the military dictatorship, the main line of the argument is that references to sculpture become significant in Ritsos’ poetry after the 1960s and culminate in the period of the junta. This is attributed to Ritsos’ subtle reaction to the regime and its use and abuse of the cultural heritage of ancient Greece in a context of propaganda and oppression. This response makes Ritsos’ use of the symbol of the statue utterly distinctive.

Creative language in Greek parliamentary discourse is investigated here in order to show that Greek parliamentarians strategically resort to such language as a means of criticism and collective party identity construction. The proposed microanalysis is combined with a macroanalysis considering linguistic creativity to correlate with the particularities of the Greek political system and the topic discussed in such debates. Taking into account the institutional parameters influencing the properties of parliamentary discourse suggested by political science, it is argued that the conditions and goals of deliberation in the Greek parliament favour the presence of creative language.