Overview
- Explores representations of trees in Byzantium
- Draws on broader scholarship on Plant Humanities and eco-criticism
- Investigates (dis)continuities with Antiquity, considering biblical and Patristic representations of nature
Part of the book series: New Approaches to Byzantine History and Culture (NABHC)
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About this book
This book examines the many ways Byzantines lived with their trees. It takes seriously theological and hagiographic tree engagement as expressions of that culture’s deep involvement—and even fascination—with the arboreal. These pages tap into the current attention paid to plants in a wide range of scholarship, an attention that involves the philosophy of plant life as well as scientific discoveries of how communicative trees may be, and how they defend themselves. Considering writings on and images of trees from Late Antiquity and medieval Byzantium sympathetically, the book argues for an arboreal imagination at the root of human aspirations to know and draw close to the divine.
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Keywords
Table of contents (5 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Reviews
“Byzantine Tree Life comprises three essays framed by a substantive introduction and conclusion. … the book itself is a conversation between three colleagues, and we the readers are invited to join. We can join first, surely, by looking again and a new at the trees that accompany our days, frame our lives, and appear copiously, indeed instructively, in the cultural remains of our Byzantine friends.” (Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Journal of Orthodox Christian Studies, Vol. 6 (1), 2023)
“Byzantine thought comes to life in this fabulous book. The authors’ lively writing style and astounding erudition brush away the dust of centuries, revitalizing the texts and images from what they call the ‘long Byzantium.’ And the lives that come to light here are not only human. With care and precision, Arentzen, Burrus, and Peers enable trees to come to the fore as the agents of intellectual, aesthetic, and religious history in their own right.”
— Michael Marder, University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain
“The quest in this three-faceted book is to give voice to the postmodern tree and its cult, while also discovering and enunciating its Byzantine equivalent. Our awe of the tree, majestic, romanticized, and endangered, is so steeped in the threats of our own era that it claims overweening urgency over every other, yet we know that the premodern era preceded many factors of denaturalization that we are now combatting. That is the book's challenge.”
— Annemarie Weyl Carr, Professor Emerita, Southern Methodist University, USA
“This is a remarkable book that should be of great interest to many scholars and theologians, not only Byzantinists, as it ranges chronologically from the Minoans in the second millennium BC to philosophers at the beginning of the third millennium AD. The entire book propels one into ideas of human-arboreal relations that one had never before contemplated: no reader will turn the last page unchanged in attitude to the natural world.”
— A.R. Littlewood, Professor Emeritus, University of Western Ontario, Canada
“An intriguing, innovative and sympathetic approach to the role of trees—as symbol, metaphor and perceived reality—in late antique and Byzantine Christian thought, this volume turns over a new leaf to tap into a powerful and exciting new current in cultural- and literary-historical research. No longer is the ‘natural’ environment—whether floral or faunal—to be taken at face value.”
— John Haldon, Professor Emeritus, Princeton University, USA
Authors and Affiliations
About the authors
Thomas Arentzen is Researcher in Greek Philology at Uppsala University and Reader in Church History at Lund University, Sweden.
Virginia Burrus is Bishop W. Earl Ledden Distinguished Professor of Religion at Syracuse University, USA.
Glenn Peers is Professor in the Department of Art and Music Histories at Syracuse University, USA.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Byzantine Tree Life
Book Subtitle: Christianity and the Arboreal Imagination
Authors: Thomas Arentzen, Virginia Burrus, Glenn Peers
Series Title: New Approaches to Byzantine History and Culture
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75902-5
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: History, History (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-75901-8Published: 12 July 2021
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-75904-9Published: 13 July 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-75902-5Published: 11 July 2021
Series ISSN: 2730-9363
Series E-ISSN: 2730-9371
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XVIII, 190
Number of Illustrations: 6 b/w illustrations, 12 illustrations in colour
Topics: History of Medieval Europe, History, general, Cultural History