This article challenges the widespread belief that Byzantine authors of the Dark Ages showed no interest in anthropological speculation. It focuses on patriarch Methodios of Constantinople († 847) who developed a highly original exegesis of Late Antique hagiographical texts, which he presented in the form of authorial comments in his paraphrases of these texts. His Encomium of St Agatha, which is based on the Passio of the saint, reveals a keen interest in the significance of gender and gender-related roles within the Christian belief system. Analysis of select passages shows that Methodios no longer subscribed to the widely held Late Antique belief that human perfection necessitated the dissociation from gender and gender-related roles, and that he therefore radically redefined such dissociation as an intermediary stage leading towards the sanctification of such urges through a redirection towards Christ.

The question of the respect of private property in Byzantium is examined through the analysis of a series of confiscations of real estate situated in Constantinople, which were carried out from 1082 to 1202 in favour of the Italian republics of Venice, Pisa and Genoa. It is argued that these confiscations were not arbitrary but justified by the circumstances. Finally, these expropriations are set against the developments in the system by which the state remunerated its servants in the period after the eleventh century, increasingly by land grants.

The re-foundation of the Athonite monastery of Xenophon at the end of the eleventh century provides an interesting case study of the activities of a ‘second founder’. The activities of Symeon the Sanctified demonstrate how a high-ranking, ex-imperial official re-established the status and possessions of Xenophon by using the wealth, legal expertise and social connections at his disposal. Making use of a detailed study of documents from the archive of Xenophon, the article suggests solutions to the puzzling chronology of Symeon’s activities on the holy mountain and discusses the causes of his conflict with the Athonite authorities and subsequent re-instatement.

In the Madrid Skylitzes manuscript (BN, Vitr. 26–2) representations of Orthodox triumph over iconoclast heresy range from startlingly novel to seemingly incoherent. While previous studies have posited that the visual programme of the chronicle originates in Comnenian Constantinople, this article argues that the visual narrative is out of place in a climate of rigorous Comnenian Orthodoxy. The visual narrative actively restructures and revisions Byzantine history: iconoclast arch-villains such as John the Grammarian are assigned symbols of sanctity, Orthodox heroes such as patriarch Methodios and empress Theodora are obscured and misrepresented, and important events in the chronicle are turned into visual voids.

Constantine Manasses’ Synopsis Chronike is a twelfth-century verse chronicle, recasting Byzantine history in a specifically Comnenian, romantic and poetic vein. The chronicle has been preserved in many manuscripts, but it has also come down to us in a number of different collections of excerpts. This article wishes to draw attention to the readers! excerptors of the Synopsis Chronike, to consider the use and usefulness of the text in relation to the composition itself. Some collections of excerpts are compared and discussed, with special focus on the excerpts included in a fifteenth-century miscellaneous manuscript (Codex Upsaliensis Graecus 8).

The edifice in Konya known as Eflatun and the church in the citadel of Alanya, both of which were maintained during the Anatolian Seljuk period, are discussed and interpreted. Architectural and historical information indicates that both structures were used during this period by the Christian spouses of the sultans as well as other Christians living and serving at court. Contrary to the common argument that the Seljuks retained churches near their palaces as a sign of their tolerance toward their Christian subjects, the paper presents evidence supporting the view that the sultans kept these structures for tactical and social reasons, for the use of their spouses and other Christian associates and servants of the Seljuk court.

This article examines how two prominent Greek critics of the period 1880–1930 — Palamas and Xenopoulos — perceived the generic character and the narrative demands of the modern Greek short story (διήγημα). It explores the degree that two cardinal aspects in the theory of the genre — the relation of the short story with the novel and the division into two separate short-story traditions — influenced both critics in their definition of the διήγημα and in their evaluation of the work of specific short story writers. The contrast and comparison of Palamas’ and Xenopoulos’ views pinpoints the standards, contradictions and restrictions that formed the critical perspectives on the διήγημα and thus highlights its neglected critical history during the period 1880–1930, which coincided with its prevalence in mainstream Greek prose fiction.

Two letters from the Vatican Registers for 1461–2, regarding funds lodged in the Bank of St George in Genoa by George Goudelis, are presented. The investment was originally intended to provide an income for the convent of St Nicholas in Constantinople but Goudelis made a proviso that if the city were to fall to the Turks, it should be used to sustain the poor. His son Manuel and granddaughter, Maria, were now petitioning the pope to have the money released to support their families. The differences between the two letters are discussed as is their significance for late Byzantine prosopography.

The influence of Greek Orthodoxy on Ritsos’ poetry, previously neglected because of the poet’s political commitments, is examined. Against the backdrop of the poet’s Orthodox upbringing and his early conversion to communism, Ritsos’ uses of Orthodoxy in certain poems written before 1948 are considered. The diversity is demonstrated during this period of Ritsos’ conception and treatment of the tensions and oppositions between Orthodoxy and Marxism. The ideological influence of Varnalis on the earliest collection, Τρακτέρ, can be contrasted with the more nuanced use of Orthodox material in Επιτάφιος and the sympathetic depiction of childhood religion in Μια πυγολαμπίδα φωτίζει τη νύχτα. Only in the particular conditions of wartime Greece does Ritsos manage a bridge between Orthodoxy and Marxism: Η Κυρά των Αμπελιών synthesizes Ritsos’ liberation message with images rooted in popular religion.

In this article, Kazantzakis’ popularity over the years is briefly reviewed and it is argued that the two dominant approaches to his work, which could be described as ethnographic and philosophical-theological, respectively, correspond to the antithesis between being and becoming. The question addressed here is whether we can read his fiction in a new way, and pass from the ontology of being to the contingency of becoming, following the example of the process theologians who brought him closer to postmodernism.

The suggestion is made here that, as part of its effort to identify the Spanish civil war with that of Greece, Madrid adopted the view that the two cases were similar in order to identify Franco’s regime with the other anti-communist regimes of Western Europe at the beginning of Cold War. During the civil wars in both Spain (1936–9) and Greece (1946–9), the ‘children’s issue’ became an important factor for humanitarian as well as for propaganda reasons. Indeed, the correspondence between the measures taken for the care of children by the two conflicting sides in both countries is impressive, in spite of the structural differences between the two civil conflicts.

In the first half of the fifteenth century a man donated an icon to the monastery of Mega Spelaion at Kalavryta; his name was less an instrument of identification than a manifesto of social association: John Tornikes Doukas Angelos Palaiologos Raoul Laskaris Philanthropenos Asanes. To judge from the chain of such resounding names of the leading late Byzantine families he clearly belonged to the dominant class of his time, and since nothing else is known of him, for lack of more precise social coordinates, we surely must count him among the aristocracy. Can we take an educated guess at what constituted a person of such social standing? He must have owned land; he probably held some office, while the accumulation of all his names points to marriage alliances between families of similar social standing. None of these assumptions suggests anything new about the aristocracy of the Palaiologan period, and yet, the overview that will follow aims to disclose exactly that: the points in which this era brought forth new developments that challenge the (thankfully dwindling) misconception of Byzantium as a state in which hardly anything changed. In 1973 Angeliki Laiou published her important article on the Palaiologan aristocracy. In twenty dense pages she made a number of remarks and reached several important conclusions that have influenced the direction of scholarship on the topic. As such it is worth summarizing these conclusions briefly.