Liminal Spaces and Spatial Practices in Byzantium (Birmingham Byzantine and Ottoman Studies)

Liminal Spaces and Spatial Practices in Byzantium offers a novel twist, combining intra-/inter-disciplinary research across the humanities and social sciences by transforming two distinct disciplinary concepts (liminality from social anthropology and space from cultural geography) into methodological devices for historical investigation. The focus has been an investigation of conceptions of spatial liminality in the Byzantine world.

This book showcases alternatives to binary oppositions such as inside/outside, core/periphery, isolation/connectedness, stability/instability, known/unknown, earthly/heavenly, self/other, and good/bad through delineating liminality as an epistemological tool. In this volume, the authors were invited to offer an analysis of Byzantine spatial experiences (attested through material remains or texts) as a sort of working platform from which to assess in due course the presence of a liminal dimension in medieval spatiotemporal situations. They have sought to understand whether certain types of spaces such as rivers, deserts, islands, forests, mountains, houses, thresholds, gates, monasteries, lighthouses, and bridges accommodate–or even create–liminal situations in the eyes of the people experiencing them.

This book will appeal to students and scholars alike interested in Byzantine history and culture.

Buket Kitapçı Bayrı is a scholar of late Byzantine and Medieval Islamic History (circa 1200–1500). Her previous publication, Warriors, Martyrs, and Dervishes: Moving Frontiers, Shifting Identities in the Land of Rome (13th–15th Centuries) (2020), examines the late medieval cultural transformation of Asia Minor and the Balkans through Byzantine and Turkish frontier epics and hagiographical texts by applying anthropological and literary theories to perceptions of shared space/shared story-world, place-making processes, and identity formation.

Myrto Veikou is Assistant Professor of Byzantine Archaeology in the Department of History and Archaeology, University of Patras (Greece). Her first PhD thesis in Byzantine Archaeology was published in 2012 (Byzantine Epirus: A Topography of Transformation: Settlements from the 7th to the 12th Centuries in Southern Epirus and Aetoloacarnania, Greece). Her second PhD thesis in Byzantine Philology and Literary Studies was published as Spatial Paths to Holiness―Literary ‘Lived Spaces’ in Eleventh-Century Byzantine Saints’ Lives (2023).