Mount Athos in Medieval Eastern Mediterranean Society
MAMEMS constitutes the first comprehensive examination of the monastic communities of Mount Athos as independent actors in medieval Eastern Mediterranean Society. This “monastic republic” was intimately connected with the Byzantine Empire, the various Orthodox principalities of the Balkans and Caucasus, South Italy, as well with the Ottoman Empire. By taking advantage of considerable advances in subfields like prosopography, analyzing and making available a set of sources (lists of commemoration) that are either poorly studied or unedited, and by bringing together an interdisciplinary team (a Byzantinist, Slavicist and Kartvelologist) under the direction of the PI, MAMEMS will transform the way the Holy Mountain is viewed within scholarship and the general public via a triad of leitmotifs: wealth, ethnicity and gender (WEG). The exploration of these topics will be undergirded by the creation of a prosopographical database, Prosopographika Athonika, containing entries for every monk to have resided on the Holy Mountain, every Athonite benefactor and every person to have visited there from ca. 850 to 1550, that is from the time of the first surviving documents in the Athonite archives until the founding of the last of the major Athonite houses, Stavronikita. This database will finally allow a concrete analysis of how medieval Mount Athos was embedded within wider networks of economic interests, church leadership, intellectual exchange and patronage.
1. Workshop (17.-18. Juni 2021)
2. Workshop (17.-19. März 2022)
Publikationen
- Z. Chitwood, Dining with the Dead: The Middle Byzantine Commemorative Banquet (Totenmahl). In: J. Liebsch / H. Poeschel / M. Grünbart (Hrsg.), Vormoderne Totenfürsorge. Perspektiven einer lebendigen Praxis (Das Mittelalter. Beihefte / Heidelberg University Publishing, open access) (eingreicht).
- Z. Chitwood, Ethnicity at the Eye of the World: Negotiating Cultural Differences on Late Medieval Mount Athos (Twelfth to Fifteenth Centuries). In: Daniel Oltean (Hrsg.), Foreign Monks in Byzantium (Peeters, voraussischtlich Ende 2022).
