Natalie Zemon Davis Annual Lecture Series - Averil Cameron: Arguing it out: discussion in Byzantium II. Latins and Greeks

The social and cultural history of Byzantium seems at first sight unsuited to the kind of thick description at which Natalie Zemon Davis excels. Yet recent scholarship that aims to locate Byzantine culture and society within new global and transnational approaches to history demands a more nuanced understanding. In these lectures Prof. Cameron will explore the question of what kind of thick description can be provided. She will focus on the long twelfth century, a time of intense creativity as well as of rising tensions, and one for which literary approaches are currently a lively area in current scholarship. She will argue for their integration within a broader approach to Byzantine social and cultural history focusing on discourse, and drawing on the many kinds of dialogue texts (secular and religious) that were a key feature of Byzantine textual production.

Latins and Greeks

Historians no longer support the idea of a ‘Great Schism’ between Greek east and Latin west in 1054. Yet the following period saw a series of religious debates between Latins and Byzantines that continued until the end of Byzantium. Many purported records of such discussions survive, as well as more literary compositions in dialogue form. Meanwhile the rise of the schools and the development of disputation in the west also had an impact on these encounters. This lecture places a type of writing usually taken in isolation within the deeper context of contemporary western and Byzantine culture. It explores the interplay of religious, social and literary factors in a period characterized by intense cultural activity.