Proceedings of the 23rd International Congress of Byzantine Studies : Round Tables

Abstract

Following the 23rd International Congress of Byzantine Studies, the Organizing Committee decided to produce an online publication of Proceedings from the Round Tables. According to the official title of the congress, Byzantium - a World of Changes, AIEB together with the Organizing Committee, have decided to implement some changes to the concept of the Round Tables. The aim of these changes were to encourage discussion at the Round Tables by presenting preliminary papers at the website in advance. The idea was to introduce the topic and papers of the individual Round Tables that would be discussed, first between the participants, and then with the public present. Therefore, the conveners of the Round Tables were asked to create Round Tables with no more than 10 participants. They collected the papers, which were to be no longer than 18,000 characters in one of the official languages of the Congress and without footnotes or endnotes. Conveners provided a general statement on the goal of each roundtable and on the content of the papers. The present volume contains papers from 49 Round Tables carefully selected to cover a wide range of topics, developed over the last five years since the previous Congress. The topics show diversity within fields and subfields, ranging from history to art history, archeology, philosophy, literature, hagiography, and sigillography. The Round Tables displayed current advances in research, scholarly debates, as well as new methodologies and concerns germane to all aspects of international Byzantine studies. The papers presented in this volume were last sent to the congress organizers in the second week of August 2016 and represent the material that was on hand at that time and had been posted on the official website; no post-congress revisions have occurred. We present this volume in hope that it will be an initial step for further development of Round Tables into collections of articles and thematic books compiled and published following the Congress, in collaboration with other interested institutions and editors. With this volume, the organizers signal their appreciation of the efforts of more than 1600 participants who contributed, both to the Round Tables and to the Congress in general.