Strange and Familiar Histories of Byzantine Art

Interpretation, Risk, and Empathy

Glenn Peers

• Publisher: Arc Humanities Press
• Year: 2026
• eBook ISBN:
  9781802704693
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Byzantine History

This book represents a risky experiment in art-history writing. It takes objects of Byzantine art—manuscript illustration, frescos, mosaic, sculpture—and reads them through the lenses of disability studies, media studies, and gender studies in order to reveal something about their significance not only in that historical culture, but also in our own. Moreover, it uses lenses of personal history and self-reflection as a way to model an open-ended and faceted art history. Modern works of film, fiction, and art likewise appear frequently so that the Byzantine objects can emerge as both more strange and more familiar, and as both of the past and of our world. Their capacity for holding multiple times, generating multiple meanings, and for multiple subjectivities is fully embraced, and perhaps a different kind of art history emerges, one that eschews argument and mastery for humility, openness, empathy—thinking with, rather than about.

Table of contents

• COVER
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Bad Byzantinist
• Icons, Dolls, Mirrors, and the Risks of Overinterpretation
• Some Animality
• Dolls and Dwarfs?
• More on “Half-Men”
• Flawed Messengers and Messages
• Living Toys
• Over the Line
• Under-Interpretation’s Risks?
• Independent Voices
• Hellenism, Museums, Agency’s Spread
• Lysi, Houston, Nicosia
• When They Can’t Speak for Themselves
• For Your Prayer Closet
• Looking at Silence
• Funnelling and Water Coursing
• Hardy’s Sexy Streams
• Terraformed
• Abjection, Madness, and Memory
• The Glenns
• Impairment and Invention
• Abjection and Healing
• One of Us
• An Aged Christ
• Resurrection
• Broken Doors, Locks, and Keys
• Impaired Landscape
• Towards a Dream Ending in the Forest
• Select Bibliography