Approaching Social Hierarchies in Byzantium

Anna C. Kelley is a research fellow at the University of St Andrews, UK. She received her PhD from the University of Birmingham, UK and has held research fellowships at the Institute for Historical Research and at Dumbarton Oaks. Flavia Vanni holds a Richard Bradford McConnell Studentship at the British School at Athens, Greece. She received her PhD from the University of Birmingham, UK and is a grant recipient of the Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture at Hellenic College Holy Cross, USA.

Introduction

1 Voicing the Rich and the Poor in Byzantium, a Methodological Problem

Anna C. Kelley and Flavia Vanni

2 Being poor in Byzantium

Chris Wickham

Part I: Working Lives

3 Who ate all the pepper? Consumers and consumables in the Mediterranean c. AD 1-800

Rebecca Darley

4 Individual or collective? Stucco-workers in Middle and Late Byzantine construction sites.

Flavia Vanni

5 No lilies of the field: Teens and children at work

Cecily Hennessy

Part II: The Material World in Life and Death

6 Trickling down, trickling up, and holding things together with crossed diagonals

Eunice Dauterman Maguire

7 The reactions of the (relatively) poor to the art of the elite

Henry Maguire

8 Hierarchy, economy, piety: Late Antique funerary textiles from Egypt in context

Anna C. Kelley

Part III: The Stratification of Space

9 Competitive piety: Rural patrons in Byzantine Arabia and Palaestina, c.500-c.630

Daniel Reynolds

10 Contextualizing secular representations in Marathos, Mani

Mark Pawlowski

11 ‘The Poor shall eat and be satisfied’: the ideal of Christian poverty in the refectories of Constantinople

Jessica Varsallona

Part IV: Philanthropy and Social Obligation

12 Poverty, imperial philanthropy, and political ideology in the historical accounts of Michael Psellos and Michael Attaleiates

Francisco Lopez Santos-Kornberger

13 Fraudulent beggars and fake monks: unease about almsgiving in Late Antiquity

Jaclyn Maxwell

14 ‘Charity begins at the monastery’: Elite female philanthropy in the Palaiologan Period

Lauren Wainwright

15 Poor in this world but not in the next? The commemoration of the Dead among the Byzantine non-elite (ca. 300-1100)

Zachary Chitwood

Conclusion

16 Looking for the poor in Byzantium: an epilogue

Leslie Brubaker