CLAS 591 Byzantium & the West: Cultural and Artistic Exchange in Medieval Europe, C. 1000-1300
This course will examine Eastern and Western cultural interaction in the High and Late Middle Ages. It will focus on the reception of Byzantine art in medieval Italy and transalpine Europe, and will include the Christian encounter with Islamic art and precious objects. It will examine these cross-cultural exchanges and the methodological approaches that scholars have developed in tracing the reception of Byzantine and Islamic imagery and objects. Among the themes that will be addressed: the circulation and afterlife of objects, the reception mechanisms of influence, appropriation, assimilation, and hybridity, Christian devotion in Byzantium and the West, social processes such as gift-giving, diplomacy, and the establishment of political ideologies.