Lecture by Divna Manolova at IMS (21-5-2024)
As part of the IMS Open Lecture Series 2023-2024, on Tuesday, May 21 at 8:30 PM at the Institute for Mediterranean Studies, the Institute will host a lecture by Divna Manolova, researcher of the History of Science and Byzantine Studies at Systèmes de Référence Temps-Espace (SYRTE), titled: "A Cosmological History of Human Habitation: Ideas of the Oikoumenē in Late Byzantium".
This discussion introduces the idea of ‘our inhabited world’ or of ‘our oikoumenē’ and how it was framed in cosmological terms in both late Byzantine and ancient works (texts and diagrams). I will demonstrate how the cosmological definition of the oikoumenē leads its framing as a geographical concept and how the latter, in turn, creates the affordances for historiographical, political and politicized interpretations of the idea of the habitable and inhabited region and regions of the world. My talk also traces where the idea of the oikoumenē is positioned in the curricula of Byzantine schools and by doing so, it questions an idea, persistent in scholarship, according to which the disciplinary boundaries between various domains of knowledge studied in Byzantium are clearly and firmly defined and moreover, coinciding with our observers’ understanding of each discipline’s remit.