The Reception of Byzantium in European Culture since 1500

Studies on the reception of the classical tradition are an indispensable part of classical studies. Understanding the importance of ancient civilization means also studying how it was used subsequently. This kind of approach is still relatively rare in the field of Byzantine Studies. This volume, which is the result of the range of interests in (mostly) non-English-speaking research communities, takes an important step to filling this gap by investigating the place and dimensions of ‘Byzantium after Byzantium’.
This collection of essays uses the idea of ‘reception-theory’ and expands it to show how European societies after Byzantium have responded to both the reality, and the idea of Byzantine Civilisation. The authors discuss various forms of Byzantine influence in the post-Byzantine world from architecture to literature to music to the place of Byzantium in modern political debates (e.g. in Russia). The intentional focus of the present volume is on those aspects of Byzantine reception less well-known to English-reading audiences, which accounts for the inclusion of Bulgarian, Czech, Polish and Russian perspectives. As a result this book shows that although so-called 'Byzantinism' is a pan-European phenomenon, it is made manifest in local/national versions.
The volume brings together specialists from various countries, mainly Byzantinists, whose works focus not only on Byzantine Studies (that is history, literature and culture of the Byzantine Empire), but also on the influence of Byzantine culture on the world after the Fall of Constantinople.

Outposts of Empire: Scientific Discovery and Colonial Displacement in Gaskell's Wives and Daughters

This article offers a fresh consideration of Elizabeth Gaskell's unfinished Wives and Daughters (1864–6), in terms of what this metropolitan novelist knew about contemporary scientific debates and imperial exploration of Africa, and how her familiarity with these discourses was incorporated into her imaginative work. Her focus for these two related themes is the naturalist Roger Hamley, whose character and exploits are meant to parallel those of the young Charles Darwin. Roger's direct involvement in the historical Geoffroy–Cuvier debate allows Gaskell to offer a sophisticated examination of how discussions about evolutionary biology (about which she learned from personal acquaintances and printed sources) contributed to political and social change in the era of the first Reform Bill. Roger's subsequent journey to Abyssinia to gather specimens allows Gaskell to form a link between science and imperial exploration, which demonstrates how, when carried to its conclusion, the development of classificatory knowledge systems was never innocent; rather, it facilitated colonial exploitation and intervention, which allowed for the ‘opening up of Africa’. Gaskell's pronouncements about science in the novel are far more explicit than her brief references to empire; the article ponders why this should be so, and offers some suggestions about how her reliance on imaginative and discursive constructs concerning the ‘Dark Continent’ may be interpreted as tacit complicity with the imperial project, or at least an interest in its more imaginative aspects.

Education and the 'universalist' idiom of empire: Irish National School Books in Ireland and Ontario

This paper compares the founding of the elementary school systems of Ireland and Ontario in the nineteenth century. The systems shared a common set of textbooks that had originated in Ireland. Using examples from a number of these books, which were part of a series that had been specially prepared for the Irish national school system, founded in 1831, and information from archive sources on policy and administration in both countries, the paper argues that there was a common, ‘universalist’, imperialist ideology being promulgated in both systems. The article focuses on these ‘universalist’ principles rather than undertaking a detailed analysis of the textbooks.