Religion and Society in Byzantium
Faith, community, and the fabric of everyday life
This course examines how Byzantine Christianity was lived rather than only believed. We consider liturgy and processional culture as civic events, the monastery as an economic actor, icon veneration as a matter of household and neighborhood, and the councils and controversies (iconoclasm, hesychasm) as arguments that reached far beyond the episcopate. Weekly readings pair primary sources in translation — homilies, typika, letters, legal texts — with recent scholarship, so students learn to move between text and social context with confidence.
- 01Week 1 — A Christian empire?
From Constantine to Justinian: the making of a Christian civic order.
- 02Week 2 — The liturgical city
Processions, feasts, and public space in Constantinople.
- 03Week 3 — Monastic economies
Land, labor, and the typikon.
- 04Week 4 — Icons and households
Devotion, image, and the domestic sphere.
- 05Week 5 — Iconoclasm reconsidered
Theology, politics, and social memory.
- 06Week 6 — Hesychasm and the late Byzantine world
Prayer, controversy, and community.
Zoe Tsiami works at the intersection of religious history and social history in the late antique and Byzantine Mediterranean. Her scholarship attends to the everyday textures of Christian life — persecution, memory-making, liturgy, and civic identity — from the age of the martyrs through the middle Byzantine centuries.