{"id":17535,"date":"2017-10-07T18:17:46","date_gmt":"2017-10-07T17:17:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/?p=17535"},"modified":"2017-10-07T18:17:46","modified_gmt":"2017-10-07T17:17:46","slug":"book-review-anthony-kaldellis-a-cabinet-of-byzantine-curiosities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/2017\/10\/07\/book-review-anthony-kaldellis-a-cabinet-of-byzantine-curiosities\/","title":{"rendered":"Book review: Anthony Kaldellis’ “A cabinet of Byzantine curiosities”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Anthony Kaldellis,\u00a0A cabinet of Byzantine curiosities: strange tales and surprising facts from history’s most orthodox empire<\/em>, Oxford University Press (2017). Available from: Amazon.com<\/a>; Amazon.co.uk<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Oxford University Press (USA) emailed and asked me to review this little volume.\u00a0 I agreed at once.\u00a0 We need more easy-to-read collections of anecdotes and wit from antiquity, and something of the kind for the Byzantine empire can only be a good thing.\u00a0\u00a0I believe Dr Kaldellis has written two preceding volumes on Roman and Greek curiosities, but I have not seen these.<\/p>\n

Such a book is aimed at the educated general reader.\u00a0 Possibly I am the ideal reader for\u00a0such a\u00a0book.\u00a0 For I collect books of anecdotes, and humour anyway, so I am familiar with the genre; and, although I am not a professional scholar, I do love tales of antiquity, and I am even interested in some parts of Byzantine history.\u00a0 So… what did I make of it?<\/p>\n

The\u00a0volume is a small hardback, with a quite magnificent cover designed by Brady McNamara.\u00a0 In fact this photograph from OUP’s website does not do it justice!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The standard of book manufacture is high – no surprise from OUP.\u00a0 There are internal photographs inline, taken from manuscripts, in monochrome.\u00a0 These are not a success, and look very murky.\u00a0 The idea is very sound; but the images\u00a0should have been reproduced in colour.\u00a0 As it is, the eye skips over them.<\/p>\n

Dr Kaldellis has assembled some 200 pages of anecdotes, taken from sources mainstream and otherwise.\u00a0 He gives the source in almost every case, and one can only respect the breadth of reading that is involved, particularly in hagiographical literature.\u00a0 Translations are his own, and he wisely advises the reader that he has paraphrased where need be to bring out the point for the general reader.\u00a0 In a book of this kind, intended for entertainment, this is entirely right and proper.<\/p>\n

As is usual in these kinds of collections, the material is organised by topic.\u00a0 A table of contents would be helpful here.\u00a0 Curiously it starts with marriage and the family; then “unorthodox sex” (!?); animals; food and dining; eunuchs; medical practice;… and so on.\u00a0 The ordering of this material seemed unusual to me.\u00a0 Usually such volumes open with military anecdotes, scholarship, and so on, wandering into more domestic items later.\u00a0 Stuff about the vices of the Byzantines should certainly have been banished to deeper inside the book.<\/p>\n

Failing to\u00a0follow the traditional (!?) order\u00a0rather undermined the author’s hope to neutralise the\u00a0picture of the Byzantines as a bunch of decadent back-stabbing effeminate cowardly treacherous superstitious scumbags.\u00a0\u00a0In fact the content left me\u00a0with precisely that impression.\u00a0 For instance the negative anecdotes about Byzantine saints, although deeply valuable to me, reinforced the impression of credulous superstition.\u00a0 Other anecdotes made clear how the Byzantines preferred bribery and treachery to courage, which reinforced the stereotype of weakness and backstabbing.\u00a0 So here the author fails in his objective.<\/p>\n

But this does not weaken the usefulness of the book to me, and probably to others.\u00a0 I don’t object to the old stereotype in any way.\u00a0 What the book gives me is solid interesting information from primary sources, that might perhaps not easily be gathered in so compact a form.\u00a0 For instance how many of us know that St Simeon the Stylite developed an abcess on his foot which dripped stinking pus all down\u00a0his pillar?\u00a0 The charlatanry of the monks is well brought out.<\/p>\n

And of course such books are rarely read from cover to cover.\u00a0 Maybe doing so is rather a mistake.\u00a0 Indeed Dr K. wisely suggests that this is the sort of book to read on the toilet.\u00a0 Nor is he wrong.\u00a0 Open it anywhere, read a bit, learn a bit, smile a bit – that is what such books are for.<\/p>\n

One decision will strike the reader at once.\u00a0 The author has decided, unusually, to give nearly all names as a transcription from Greek.\u00a0 So “Konstantinos” appears all over the place, instead of Constantine (with the absurd result that on one page we have Constantine I facing Konstantinos V!); Ioannes rather than John; and even Isaccios Komnenos for Isaac Comnenus.\u00a0 This habit, creeping in among some academics, is deplorable.\u00a0 It achieves nothing, since all of us know what is meant.\u00a0 It places a barrier in the way of the general reader.\u00a0 It (again!) vitiates the author’s purpose, to suggest that the medieval Greeks were the Roman successors, when the names are so utterly odd and un-Roman.\u00a0 This was a mistake, and OUP should have prevented this.\u00a0\u00a0Many\u00a0ordinary people\u00a0can\u00a0empathise with the brave death of Constantine XI, going out in 1453 to die fighting in the streets as the Turks breached the walls of Constantinople.\u00a0 Nobody cares a\u00a0bit about a king called Konstantinos XI, whoever he might have been.\u00a0 I suspect that Dr. K. is not to blame, but these sorts of games, which tend to exclude the ordinary folk, are a form of\u00a0elitism.<\/p>\n

I learned a great deal from the book.\u00a0 Again and again I found myself drawn, wanting to put down the volume and go and look up the original source.\u00a0 (In some cases, of course, I remembered the original, and I didn’t detect any significant lack of reliability).<\/p>\n

This is not a joke book either.\u00a0 But the stories are interesting enough.\u00a0 Anyone interested in Byzantium will find useful stuff in here, relatively easily absorbed.\u00a0 So I think\u00a0I can\u00a0recommend the book, although I would definitely argue against reading it from the front.\u00a0 Read it on the toilet, read it in bits here and there.\u00a0 Because of the contents, I cannot recommend it as a gift for the monk in your life, however; which is a shame, since the Most Orthodox Empire is a subject that would otherwise appeal to many of them.<\/p>\n

UPDATE: Added links to Amazon with my tag on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anthony Kaldellis,\u00a0A cabinet of Byzantine curiosities: strange tales and surprising facts from history’s most orthodox empire, Oxford University Press (2017). Available from: Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk. Oxford University Press (USA) emailed and asked me to review this little volume.\u00a0 I agreed at once.\u00a0 We need more easy-to-read collections of anecdotes and wit from antiquity, and something of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[19],"tags":[322,354],"class_list":["post-17535","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-from-my-diary-announcements","tag-book-reviews","tag-byzantine"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17535","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17535"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17535\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}