Early Medieval Western Research Articles

Living on the Byzantine Borders of Western Art

In general surveys of art history in current use, Byzantine art has been separated from Western Medieval art by several strategies. Most often Early Christian and Byzantine art follows Roman art and precedes Islamic art. Advancing as late as the sixteenth or seventeenth century in Orthodox and Islamic countries, the surveys turn back to early medieval Western Europe from which another narrative proceeds directly to the Renaissance. In some survey books, the transition from Rome to Byzantium and Islam is also the moment to introduce the arts of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. These organizational strategies, which disassociate Byzantium from Western Europe, are encountered in art history's first general handbooks, published in Germany in the mid-nineteenth century by Franz Kugler and Carl Schnaase, and still earlier in the influential Philosophy of History by G. W. F. Hegel. The surveys' chronological inversions and Hegel's general assessment of Byzantium should be understood as a manifestation of Orientalism, a cultural prejudice detected in other aspects of the treatment of Byzantine art in American textbooks. Instead, it is suggested that new accountings of medieval art transcend the rigid conceptual boundaries inherited from European nationalism and explore larger problems across the many cultures and spaces of the Middle Ages.

Problems of Comparing Rural Societies in Early Medieval Western Europe

There is surprisingly little early medieval social history being written. In recent years, more specifically economic history has had a remarkable rebirth, thanks to the (largely unconnected) efforts of archaeologists on the one side and Belgian and German historians on the other; but the study of society in general, outside the restricted spheres of the aristocracy and the church, has been neglected. I speak schematically; obviously, there are notable exceptions. But it is significant that noone, in any country, has thought it worthwhile to attempt a synthesis of early medieval European socio-economic history as a whole that could replace those of Alfons Dopsch or, maybe, André Déléage. It would be hard; but people have tried it for the centuries after 900, with interesting (even if inevitably controversial) results. Why not earlier? Richard Sullivan recently lamented the conservatism of most Carolingian scholarship; in the arena of social history, he could easily have extended his complaints back to 500.