Books

“To judge from their art history, the lavishly illustrated Byzantine lectionaries have been too exquisite to think with. Now Roland Betancourt summons them to compelling new life as “new media” of Byzantine sacred performance. Examining them, as Ian Bogost did video games, as ‘procedural rhetoric,’ a practice of authoring arguments through processes, he follows their use through the liturgy: first as they animate the intellect and imagination of the cantor who reads the text of their superbly inscribed, adorned and notated pages visually; and then as this same vivid grasp of ideas and events and sounds is transmitted to those who read them through the ears as an aural text, hearing them majestically chanted in the radiant and resonant spaces of a church like Hagia Sophia. Recent research into the many Byzantine understandings of reading—visual, oral, and aural; in images, words, and image-word combinations—is combined here with even newer insights into the behavior of sound in Byzantine ecclesiastical spaces, especially in Hagia Sophia, and the ever-expanding understanding of liturgical practice, performance, and drama.

From the long resonance of two syllables in the reverberant space under Hagia Sophia’s dome to the dismissal of the catechumens at the end of the Gospel reading, the book follows the unfolding of the lections in sight, sound, and motion, transforming the lectionaries that contain them into dazzlingly engineered devices for sacred communication.”

—Annemarie Weyl Carr, University Distinguished Professor of Art History Emerita, Southern Methodist University

Tracing the Gospel text from script to illustration to recitation, this study looks at how illuminated manuscripts operated within ritual and architecture. Focusing on a group of richly illuminated lectionaries from the late eleventh century, the book articulates how the process of textual recitation produced marginalia and miniatures that reflected and subverted the manner in which the Gospel was read and simultaneously imagined by readers and listeners alike. This unique approach to manuscript illumination points to images that slowly unfolded in the mind of its listeners as they imagined the text being recited, as meaning carefully changed and built as the text proceeded. By examining this process within specific acoustic architectural spaces and the sonic conditions of medieval chant, the volume brings together the concerns of sound studies, liturgical studies, and art history to demonstrate how images, texts, and recitations played with the environment of the Middle Byzantine church.

“[Byzantine Intersectionality] quotes Monica Lewinsky in its epigraph and brings an activist’s zeal to its queer-theory close readings of texts and images from the Eastern Roman Empire between the fourth and fifteenth centuries. By scouring legal, medical, and religious sources, and reading misogynist invectives against the grain, Betancourt builds a fascinating picture of more fluid attitudes and practices around sexuality than have been suggested in the mainstream historical record. . . . The details Betancourt excavates can be as illuminating as they are juicy.”

—Lidija Haas, Harper’s Magazine

“[Byzantine Intersectionality] raises timely and pressing questions about gender, sexuality, marginalized groups, and diversity in the medieval Roman Empire. . . . This indispensable book makes clear that the study of Byzantine art is relevant and pressing today.”

—Armin Bergmeier, Art Bulletin

“This book is for the outcast and for those who inhabit the margins of the past and present. . . . Byzantine Intersectionality provides art historians, archaeologists, and historians with a better theoretical basis for reconstructing the complex lived reality of queerness, sexual violence, consent, and racial profiling. The marginalized biblical figures and saints examined together serve as a new testament to how engrained systematic oppression functions in society.”

—Sarah E. Bond, Hyperallergic

“[The book’s title] refers to the interaction between gender, sexuality and race, how the intersections between these three separate things were understood in Byzantine society and how these understandings endured or shifted across the period of the Empire’s history from (roughly) the fourth century to the 15th. . . . The book is rooted in a huge number of meticulously studied late antique and medieval sources. Importantly, Betancourt allows them the freedom to speak for themselves.”

—Adele Curness, History Today

“[Byzantine Intersectionality] is an insightful and powerful new addition to not only Medieval Studies, but also History of Art, Critical Race Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Queer Studies. . . . An exciting and radical new project with an ethical dimension and urgency, this text challenges the ways scholars have viewed Byzantine society and culture. . . . [This] innovative text provokes from the epigraph by Lewinsky to the final sentence with its ethical imperative for social and racial justice.”

—Meaghan Allen, LSE Review of Books

“A major accomplishment of [Byzantine Intersectionality] is its interdisciplinarity. As opposed to other scholars of the middle ages whose focus is narrowed to a specific discipline, Betancourt’s text covers the large disciplinary gaps between literary studies, art history, and historical studies, to create a wide-ranging view of the period and allowing scholars to create thematic connections previously unknown across the disciplines. . . . Another important aspect of this text is the potential implications for the field moving forward. Betancourt’s recalibration of the definitions of sexuality, gender, and race has opened countless doors for other medievalists to analyze literature, historical documents, and art for the sole purpose of expanding known histories of sex, gender, and race.”

—Morgan Connor, Pennsylvania Literary Review

“Every Byzantinist needs to read this book. . . . A highly stimulating and thought-provoking book. It is also a beautifully produced book.”

—Shaun Tougher, Medieval Encounters

“This radically interdisciplinary tour de force gives extraordinary insight into nonnormative Byzantine subjectivities while breathtakingly detailing how gender, race, and sexuality were understood and deployed. A magnificent book, Byzantine Intersectionality shows us how critical race theory and queer and transgender studies can change our understanding of the past.”

—Steven Nelson, Dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at National Gallery of Art

“Byzantine Intersectionality takes up the challenge of reading ancient texts—visual and linguistic—through the lens of contemporary methodologies and, even more daringly, current social identities and concepts. Dazzling in its analysis, thoroughly researched, and theoretically illuminating, this book changes not only how we see the Byzantine era, but also the stakes of recent work in queer, transgender, and critical race studies. Byzantine Intersectionality is for anyone who wants to learn how the past makes the present new.”

— Elizabeth Freeman, author of Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories

“Rich with startling and even alarming evidence, this book offers a timely and challenging perspective on Byzantine society and culture. Placing late ancient and medieval Greek texts and images into dialogue with some of the most pressing concerns of our own day, including gender, sexuality, race, and identity, Byzantine Intersectionality may be the most significant communication from Byzantine studies to the rest of the humanities this decade.”

—Derek Krueger, Senior Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks and Joe Rosenthal Excellence Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro

“Byzantine Intersectionality makes claims about historically remote gender-variant subjects and minority sexualities that are bound to be controversial. Whatever readers may think about the historicization of sexuality and gender, however, they are sure to find material here that will challenge preconceived notions about the histories of race, gender, sexuality, and desire.”

—Jack Halberstam, author of Female Masculinity

“Essential and groundbreaking, Byzantine Intersectionality is a major contribution to the ongoing discussion in critical race studies and gender, sexuality, and transgender studies.”

—Dorothy Kim, author of The Alt-Medieval: Digital Whiteness and Medieval Studies

“Byzantine Intersectionality aims at nothing less than the recuperation of trans identities of the premodern past. Skillfully bridging the chronological gap separating the Byzantine from the modern and beyond, Betancourt exploits the fecundity of anachronism. His engagement with materiality, and his exploration of the philosophical commitments pertaining to the relationship of form and matter, are nuanced and provocative.”

—Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Professor of History at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

“Provocative, imaginative, and original, Byzantine Intersectionality cuts across disciplines with an urgent and political voice. It investigates important topics and will stir up controversy and conversation.”

—Charles Barber, Professor of Art History at Princeton University

This is a very learned and important book, with significant ramifications for thinking about sight and touch, aesthetics, the cultural history of vision, the historiography of Byzantine art and continuity/shift between the classical world and Byzantium. Betancourt shows better than allprevious scholarship how theories of vision/touch grow out of their classical intellectual archaeology.’

—Jaś Elsner, Humphrey Payne Senior Research Fellow in Classical Art, Corpus Christi College, Oxford University

“[This book] offer[s] a multi-disciplinary view of subjects as varied as historiography, art history, architecture, stage design, psychoanalytic thought and theology.”

— Joseph Masheck and Edmund Ryder

“A remarkable and remarkably wide-ranging collection, then, and one that will provide at least some food for thought for anyone with an interest in the continuing contemporary cultural dialogue with Byzantium. In addition, it provides an essential springboard for further reflection on the themes it addresses, and its methdological breadth is encouraging, if at times disconcerting; but to be disconcerted is often valuable for stimulating thought, and that is one objective that this book accomplishes triumphantly.” 

— Fr. Ivan Moody