Byzantine Media Subjects

Glenn A. Peers

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781501775024
• eBook ISBN: 9781501775048
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: History of Medieval Art
• Index: History

Byzantine Media Subjects invites readers into a world replete with images—icons, frescoes, and mosaics filling places of worship, politics, and community. Glenn Peers asks readers to think themselves into a world where representation reigned and humans followed, and indeed were formed. Interrogating the fundamental role of representation in the making of the Byzantine human, Peers argues that Byzantine culture was (already) posthuman.

The Byzantine experience reveals the extent to which media like icons, manuscripts, music, animals, and mirrors fundamentally determine humans. In the Byzantine world, representation as such was deeply persuasive, even coercive; it had the power to affect human relationships, produce conflict, and form self-perception. Media studies has made its subject the modern world, but this book argues for media having made historical subjects. Here, it is shown that media long ago also made Byzantine humans, defining them, molding them, mediating their relationship to time, to nature, to God, and to themselves.

Table of contents

• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction: Making Media Subjects
• Keywords
• Chapter 1. The Mandylion’s Marital and Martial Message Machines
• Chapter 2. Animal Media and Personhood
• Chapter 3. Mingling Musical Subjects
• Chapter 4. Monk-Making in Time
• Chapter 5. Mirror as Media and Triclinius’s Man in the Moon
• Conclusion: So-Called Man and Media Deliverance
• Appendix 1: On the Vigil in Antioch
• Appendix 2: The Feast of St. Eugenius of Trebizond
• Appendix 3: On the Dark Figure in the Moon
• Bibliography
• Index