Dragons were a well-established feature of the Byzantine supernatural imagination, and certain conventions governed their behaviour as described in hagiography. The textual traditions associated with Ss Perpetua, Marina of Antioch and Elisabeth the Miracle-Worker illustrate the changing role of the creatures from late antiquity through the middle Byzantine period. Although early works portray them as minor nuisances, compilations of the ninth century and later give them a new prominence, hinting at an editorial fascination with dragons which acted in a similar manner on otherwise unrelated texts.
The rulers of the Byzantine Empire and its commonwealth were protected both by their own soldiers and by a heavenly army: the military saints. The transformation of Saints George, Demetrios, Theodore and others into the patrons of imperial armies was one of the defining developments of religious life under the Macedonian emperors. This book provides a comprehensive study of military sainthood and its roots in late antiquity. The emergence of the cults is situated within a broader social context, in which mortal soldiers were equated with martyrs and martyrs of the early Church recruited to protect them on the battlefield. Dr White then traces the fate of these saints in early Rus, drawing on unpublished manuscripts and other under-utilised sources to discuss their veneration within the princely clan and their influence on the first native saints of Rus, Boris and Gleb, who eventually joined the ranks of their ancient counterparts.
From classical times until the present day, 'nomads' have been compared and contrasted with 'sedentary' societies, often being held up as a prime example of 'the other'. 1 Authors have emphasised their strange food, language, clothing, housing, and customs, often describing them as invaders or raiders. These negative traits are often understood to be the result of the nomads' mobile pastoralist lifestyle, because their constant movement subverted the norms of settled society and made interactions difficult. Such clichés, repeated over centuries, have contributed to uncritical assessments of both pastoralists and their neighbours.But in contrast to other major aspects of human experience (gender, class, race, etc.), scholars, and particularly historians, have largely failed to move beyond othering portrayals of 'nomads' to interrogate the category of mobility itself, and its importance across perceived social divides. This oversight has done nothing to counteract a scholarly tendency to lapse into stereotypes and teleology: 2 the term 'nomad' is applied to certain groups, often with 1 The earliest extant western discussion of this sort is in Herodotus, The Histories, trans. Aubrey de Selincourt (London, 1954), Book 4, 271-318. 2 The appropriation of the term by theorists has not advanced our understanding of nomads as historical phenomena because it relies on the same unproblematised stereotypes: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis, 1987), ch. 12 '1227: Treatise on Nomadology -The War Machine', 351-423. 266negative implications, while other groups which engaged in similar activities are not given the same label because they fall on the other side of a historical, ethnic or rhetorical line. Such stereotyping also has implications for the understanding of supposedly sedentary groups whose significant mobility is effaced by insistence on the nomad/sedentary dichotomy. The identity of sedentary groups can readily be based on their contrast with, and often their opposition to, the nomad, but despite pervasive implications to the contrary, this did not arise from an intrinsic divide but rather was adventitious and a matter of convenience. 3 These tendencies are particularly pronounced in discussions of the medieval world, since groups identified as 'nomadic' by modern scholars rarely left written records and much of the associated archaeology is thinly scattered and not well studied. 4 In many studies, the 3 E.g. Naomi Standen, Unbounded Loyalty: Frontier Crossings in Liao China (Honolulu, 2007); Yang Shao-yun, 'Fan and Han: The Origins and Uses of a Conceptual Dichotomy in Mid-Imperial China, ca. 500-1200', in Francesca Fiaschetti and Julia Schneider (eds.), Political Strategies of Identity Building in Non-Han Empires in China (Wiesbaden, 2014), 9-36. 4 Sinor, 'Reflections', 5-6. The fieldwork currently permitted in China maintains a traditional focus on tombs and urban sites that illuminate politics, religion and elites, for instance, Dong Xinlin...
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