{"id":2308,"date":"2014-09-04T14:34:11","date_gmt":"2014-09-04T14:34:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/manuscriptevidence.org\/wpme\/?page_id=2308"},"modified":"2014-09-04T14:43:29","modified_gmt":"2014-09-04T14:43:29","slug":"rohdewald-2014-congress","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/manuscriptevidence.org\/wpme\/abstracts\/rohdewald-2014-congress\/","title":{"rendered":"Rohdewald (2014 Congress)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Stefan Rohdewald<br \/>\n(<em>Historical Institut, Justus Liebig University, Giessen, Germany<\/em>)<br \/>\n\u201cWithin a Southeast European Multiple-Contact Zone: \u00a0The Conceptualization of Medieval Bulgarian and Early Ottoman History\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Abstract of Paper Presented at the 49th International Congress on Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo, May 2014)<br \/>\nSession on <strong>\u201cA Neglected Empire: \u00a0Bulgaria between the Late Twelfth and Late Fourteenth Centuries\u201d<br \/>\nPart II: \u00a0&#8220;Engaging in Empire, From Center to Periphery and Beyond&#8221;<\/strong><br \/>\nCo-sponsored by the <strong>Research Group on Manuscript Evidence<\/strong> and the <strong>Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies<\/strong> at the University of Florida<br \/>\nOrganized by Mildred Budny (<em>Research Group on Manuscript Evidence<\/em>) and Florin Curta (<em>University of Florida<\/em>)<br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/manuscriptevidence.org\/wpme\/2014-congress-accomplished\/\"><strong>2014 Congress Accomplished<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<p>[<em>First published on our first website on 20 March 2014<\/em>]<\/p>\n<p>The proximity of Slavs, Turkish tribes, and Byzantium is an old and extensively investigated topic of research. \u00a0Since the nineteenth century, the Romantic concept of \u201chomogenic cultures\u201d has prevailed: \u00a0\u201cSlavic culture\u201d or \u201cBulgarian culture\u201d was uniformly seen as influenced by the \u201cByzantine culture\u201d, and several degrees of \u201cacculturation\u201d were made discerned by Dmitri Obolensky. \u00a0While Ivan Duychev argued for the rise of \u201ca transnational. . . Mediterranean Slavic\u2013Byzantine culture,\u201d he described \u201ca . . . culture\u201d consisting mainly of two homogenous components: \u201cthe Byzantine and the Slavic.\u201d \u00a0While Alexander Avenarius investigated the \u201cafter-life\u201d of Byzantine \u201celements of culture\u201d among the Slavs, he delineated how already in Preslav, the capital of the First Bulgarian Empire, \u201cByzantine influences were received with increasing intensity, to the detriment of the very essence of Bulgarian culture.\u201d \u00a0Yet the assumption of one or more homogenous systems of culture, on which this analysis was based, has been more recently overcome by the critique of such conceptions of culture and by the interpretation of the region as a whole as \u201cfrontier\u201d and \u201carea of contact,\u201d notably by Paul Stephenson and Florin Curta.<\/p>\n<p>In contrast to the notion of isolated homogenous cultures, I will argue, with several examples, in support of an analysis of medieval Southern Europe \u2014 including Asia Minor (cf. Daniel Goffman) \u2014 as a \u201cmultiple contact zone\u201d constituted by a multitude of cultural practices. \u00a0Examination of the evidence, in the light of this current discourse, reveals that the abstract historiographical description of cultural practices in their social and communicative settings is helpful, while ethnic labels are not always helpful. \u00a0On this abstract level of interpretation, the dense entanglements of Byzantine, Slavic, Turkic, Cuman, Bulgarian, Seljuk, Ottoman, and Western European elements constituted a large, unstable, and heterogenous region with several centers of condensation and with Constantinople at its core, defined rather more by cultural practices of legitimization of power, religious veneration, habitus, economics, regional dynastic alliances, and factional warfare than by impermeable and seemingly intractable religious or ethnic boundaries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Stefan Rohdewald (Historical Institut, Justus Liebig University, Giessen, Germany) \u201cWithin a Southeast European Multiple-Contact Zone: \u00a0The Conceptualization of Medieval Bulgarian and Early Ottoman History\u201d Abstract of Paper Presented at the 49th International Congress on Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo, May 2014) Session on \u201cA Neglected Empire: \u00a0Bulgaria between the Late Twelfth and Late Fourteenth Centuries\u201d Part II: [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":1023,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscriptevidence.org\/wpme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2308"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscriptevidence.org\/wpme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscriptevidence.org\/wpme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscriptevidence.org\/wpme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscriptevidence.org\/wpme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2308"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/manuscriptevidence.org\/wpme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2308\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2319,"href":"https:\/\/manuscriptevidence.org\/wpme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2308\/revisions\/2319"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscriptevidence.org\/wpme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscriptevidence.org\/wpme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}