Many would consider the legacy of the Byzantine Empire (also known as the Eastern Roman Empire) to be its lasting contributions to art and literature. This legacy includes references to and conversations about matters that most would consider contemporary—issues that until recently have remained at the margins.
These include matters of reproductive consent, sexual shaming, trans and nonbinary genders, queer intimacies, and racial identity. Scouring medieval medical guides, religious texts and archival records, Roland Betancourt, Chancellor’s Fellow and professor of art history and visual studies at the University of California, Irvine, has compiled and analyzed these longstanding conversations to reveal a richer past with undeniable connections to the present. This groundbreaking research is the basis for his new book, Byzantine Intersectionality (Princeton University Press, 2020), the first work of scholarship to approach Byzantine texts and works of art through an intersectional lens.
“My goal is to attend to the people who often go unnoticed in traditional historiography — or deliberately ignored,” he says.
These include matters of reproductive consent, sexual shaming, trans and nonbinary genders, queer intimacies, and racial identity. Scouring medieval medical guides, religious texts and archival records, Roland Betancourt, Chancellor’s Fellow and professor of art history and visual studies at the University of California, Irvine, has compiled and analyzed these longstanding conversations to reveal a richer past with undeniable connections to the present. This groundbreaking research is the basis for his new book, Byzantine Intersectionality (Princeton University Press, 2020), the first work of scholarship to approach Byzantine texts and works of art through an intersectional lens.
“My goal is to attend to the people who often go unnoticed in traditional historiography — or deliberately ignored,” he says.