Browsing by Subject "Hagiography"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2

Open Access
“And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heaven and to everything that creeps on the earth”: animals in Byzantium
(2022-05) Mulla, Ayşenur
This thesis examines the relationship between the Byzantines and animals (in particular small ones like worms and bees) in terms of practical, socio-economic, and religious terms mainly using the written sources (hagiographies, ancient scientific sources, miracle stories, or legal documents), archaeological, zooarchaeological, and architectural remains from different areas of the Byzantine Empire. The main idea of the thesis stems from socio-cultural and religious studies of the Byzantine society, which (with the exception of a few scholars like Sophia Germanidou, Henrietta Kroll, Nancy Sevcenko, and Tristan Schmidt, who have studied the Byzantine animals and their mentality about the world of bestiary), has mostly focused on the economics of animals and their rearing. In fact, and contrary to the mainstream historiography, this study tries to bridge a gap between the role of the animals, especially the smallest ones like worms, bees, insects, and silkworms, as they have tended to be forgotten when examining the socio-cultural and economic dynamics of Byzantine society at large. Bearing in mind the limits and the problems of sources, both primary and secondary, the main goal of this thesis is to scrutinize the Byzantine narrative about these animals, to recreate the Byzantine perception and utilization of the other living beings as well as to understand the multi-faceted benefits of the presence of animals in the daily life of the Byzantines.
Open Access
The image of the other in the fifteenth-century Christian and Muslim hagiographies
(2008) Nazlar, Nergiz
In the thesis we have aimed to examine the image of the other in fifteenthcentury Ottoman history. With this aim in mind, we have carried out our research focusing on the analysis of the image of the other both within the population of Orthodox Christians under Ottoman rule, and also within Ottoman society. We have argued that hagiographies and menakıbnames can be utilized as reliable historical sources for cultural-historical research. With this view we have examined eight Orthodox Christian neo-martyr hagiographies and two Ottoman menakıbnames from the fifteenth century (more specifically those of Şeyh Bedreddin and Otman Baba), in addition to Byzantine and Ottoman chronicles of the period. Three fundamental tasks are established as the focus of the thesis: who the other is, how the other is perceived, and what this process of otherization reveals about the prejudices, preoccupations, and concerns of the authors in relation to the broader world. Our analysis of the image of the other in fifteenth century Ottoman history shows that although the hagiographical and menakıbname sources were written from a religious perspective, how the other was perceived in this period had much more to do with political than theological motivations. The socio-religious antagonisms witnessed in these texts should thus be seen a result of the underlying political antagonisms arising in the fifteenth century, both within the Orthodox Christian populations under Ottoman rule and among the Muslim Ottoman population, rather than being treated in isolation as a strictly religious affair.