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Reinventing Antiquity in Middle Period China and ByzantiumRitual, Learning and Visual Culture

Edited by Curie Virág and Niels Gaul

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Published 31 May 2027

Open access under CC-BY 4.0

About this book

Unites scholars of China and Byzantium to explore the reception, revival and reinvention of the classical legacy

  • Identifies striking commonalities and divergences between Chinese and Byzantine classicising practices in a variety of spheres, providing insight into the nature and significance of the classical legacy in both traditions 
  • Goes beyond spotlight comparisons and juxtapositions of the two traditions to channel the insights and resources afforded by sustained cross-cultural engagement between scholars of the two traditions
  • Brings together contributions on wide-ranging source material from a remarkable array of disciplines, including intellectual history, social history, the history of medicine, science and mathematics, religious studies, and art history
  • Offers insight into the lines of connection among diverse spheres of social, cultural and intellectual life through the lens of classicising practices

A striking commonality of both Chinese and Byzantine societies from the 10th to the 14th centuries was a renewed interest in embodying and emulating the ideas, values and civilisation of classical antiquity. This volume of contributions from leading scholars of middle period China and Byzantium investigates the broad transcultural phenomenon of classicising engagement that goes beyond particular genres and disciplines. It examines a broad range of textual practices as well as considering classicising learning as practices that involved visual and material culture, and that took place in such diverse domains as the transmission and teaching of scientific knowledge, the education of women, religious ritual and rites of healing, burial practices and landscape painting.

Through these investigations, the collection enhances our understanding of the imaginative power of antiquity in diverse spheres of intellectual and cultural life in both China and Byzantium.

Table of contents

Preface
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures

Introduction: Antiquity, the Spaces of Classicising Learning,
and the Self in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century China and Byzantium
Curie Virág

Part I. Contexts: Antiquity in the World of Eleventh Century Literati
1. Byzantium and Song in the Long Eleventh Century: Empire and the Reinvention of Antiquity
Peter K. Bol and Niels Gaul

Part II. Rituals of Piety and Healing
2. Symeon the New Theologian's Ecstatic Experience and the Monastic Culture of Reference in Byzantium
Derek Krueger
3. Liturgical Communities: Registering Donations for Healing in Medieval Chinese Buddhism
Stephen F. Teiser

Part III. The Transmission of Cosmological, Astronomical, and Mathematical Knowledge
4. Why Print Ancient Mathematical Works in Early Thirteenth-century China? Bao Huanzhi’s Edition of Mathematical Texts of the Past
Karine Chemla
5. Why Learn Cosmology and Astronomy from the Ancients in Early Palaiologan Byzantium? Neophytos Prodromenos and Cleomedes’ The Heavens
Divna Manolova

Part IV. Virtue, Pleasure and the Reading Subject
6. Portraits of the Reader in the Middle Byzantine Period
Stratis Papaioannou
7. Becoming like the Ancients: Zhu Xi on Pleasure, Embodiment and the Reading Subject
Curie Virág

Part V. The Visual and Material Culture of Classicising Ritual and Paideia
8. Classicizing Death Ritual and Burial Objects in the Late Northern Song Dynasty: Lü Dalin and His Family Cemetery
Ya-hwei Hsu
9. Women’s Paideia in Medieval Byzantium
Alicia Walker

Part VI. Classicism and Landscape
10. Seeing Mount Lu: On an Ontological Shift of the Gaze
Xin Conan-Wu
11. Two Byzantine Mountains and the Poetics of Landscape
Benjamin Anderson

About the contributors

Curie Virág

Curie Virág is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. She works in the history of ethics, epistemology, moral psychology, and philosophical anthropology in classical China and across traditions, with a particular focus on emotions. She is the author of The Emotions in Early Chinese Philosophy (Oxford, 2017); co-editor, with Douglas Cairns, of In the Mind, in the Body, in the World: Emotions in Early China and Ancient Greece (Oxford, 2024); and co-editor, with David Konstan, of Before Emotion: Conceptualizing Affectivity in Pre-modern Cultures (Palgrave, 2026).

Niels Gaul

Niels Gaul is the A. G. Leventis Professor of Byzantine Studies and Head of Classics at the University of Edinburgh. His recent books include The Greek Revolution of 1821: European Contexts, Scottish Connections (2024), co-edited with Roderick Beaton, and The Post-1204 Byzantine World: New Directions and Novel Approaches (2026), co-edited with Mike Carr and Yannis Stouraitis.