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CMES is pleased to present the 2024 Annual H.A.R. Gibb Lectures
The Byzantine and Ottoman intellectual encounter, 14th–16th centuries
April 8: The historiographical stakes
April 9: Bureaucrats in Greek and Arabic: archival documents
April 11: Intellectuals in Greek and Arabic: Philosophy and the Sciences
with
Maria Mavroudi, Professor of Byzantine History, University of California, Berkeley, with additional appointments at the departments of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies and Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures
These lectures are dedicated to the memory of Cornell Fleischer.
Maria Mavroudi was born in Thessaloniki, Greece and studied Philology at the University of her native city before earning a Ph.D. in Byzantine studies at Harvard. Her scholarly work begun by focusing on a tenth-century Byzantine book on dream interpretation that had been widely received in Latin and the European vernaculars and counted as the Christian dreambook of the Middle Ages. While generally viewed as a Byzantine invention partly based on the second-century manual of Artemidorus, she showed that it was a Christian adaptation of Arabic Islamic material and one among a larger group of texts originally written in Arabic or Persian and received into Greek between the ninth and the fifteenth centuries.
During the next two decades, she worked on identifying the place of these translations within Byzantine literary culture and its reception in “East” and “West’ during the medieval and early modern period. This begs reconsidering the position of the ancient Greek classics within the Byzantine, Arabic, and Latin intellectual traditions, as well as the supposed marginality of Byzantium within a broader medieval intellectual universe. Her work was recognized with a MacArthur fellowship in 2002.
Contact: Liz Flanagan