Strange and Familiar Histories of Byzantine Art

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.

Glenn Peers is Emeritus Professor at the University of Texas at Austin and Syracuse University. His most recent books are Byzantine Media Subjects (2024) and “The Bird Who Sang the Trisagion” of Isaac of Antioch: Becoming Parrot in a Late Antique Syriac Sermon, with Robert A. Kitchen (2024).