In her paradigm-shifting 1977 book, Peasant Society in the Late Byzantine Empire: A Social and Demographic Study (Princeton), the late Angeliki Laiou led elitist Byzantinists out of the cosmopolitan city and into the village, where she introduced us to Maria, an imagined peasant woman, whose biography she constructed from the sorts of information provided in surviving tax registers. In her recent, award-winning Rural Lives and Landscapes, the UCLA-based art historian Sharon Gerstel follows Laiou's lead into the countryside of Late Medieval Greece, where she introduces us to Mrs. Kanella Georgopoulou, an elderly villager in the Mani, who similarly functions as a literary device: she appears as a cicerone at the beginning, as she leads the author to her village church, lamenting that no one is interested in the past; Gerstel's study concludes with a visit to her ossuary after her death; she appears once again in the author photo on the back flap of the dust jacket. It's an oddly sentimental touch. The difference between Maria and Kyria Kanella is, of course, that the former is fictitious but belongs to the Byzantine period, whereas the latter is a real person, of our day and age.
Of course, Byzantinists are interested in the past, all sorts of pasts, high and low, urban and rural. The problem is how to get at them – how to breathe life into people and places centuries dead, how to contextualize the limited, disjointed information we have at our disposal. For the big city of Constantinople, we have a plethora of texts and a few discrete decontextualized monuments, mostly churches, along with a variety of pitiful, rapidly disappearing archaeological remains. Not surprisingly, the big city has been the domain of text-based scholars, accompanied by a few hardy art historians, and virtually no archaeologists – at least in the last 40 years, that is. For the countryside, the picture is reversed: archaeology leads the way, followed by a few hardy art historians, and virtually no text-based scholars. The difference in approach may be accounted for in part by the nature of the accessible evidence, as well as by the methodological interests of those who choose to pursue it.
Gerstel's elegant book asks, How do we develop a more integrated approach? How do we construct a context for what does survive? How might we use the evidence of material culture and visual culture to write history? Traditional art history relies on stylistic and iconographic analysis of visual images and has only in the last decades become concerned with issues of context and social history. Because surviving decorative programs appear in churches, they are normally read in religious terms only, as manifestations of the belief system of the period, rather than as windows onto the society that produced them. Marxist-leaning historians of material culture, on the other hand, tend to shy away from ‘high’ art and architecture that reek of elitism or religiosity. At the same time, social historians, concerned with networks of exchange, community, political and familial relations, rarely attempt to situate people in space – that is, to place them into the settlements, landscapes, or even the houses they once occupied. And religious historians view society from the vantage point of the church or monastery, rarely venturing beyond. The nature of the surviving evidence from Byzantium demands a more integrated perspective.
Drawing on the fruits of her rich, insistently interdisciplinary career, Gerstel offers us a model that attempts to integrate these many different approaches to construct ‘a series of overlapping landscapes: agricultural, domestic, and sacred.’ The focus is on Greece – primarily the Peloponnese, but also bringing in sites from the mainland, Crete, and the islands – in the Late Byzantine era. This is not a homogenous period: the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries are fragmented, with Byzantine territories contested by Western Europeans (after the disastrous Fourth Crusade of 1204), the Serbs and Bulgarians encroaching from the north, and ultimately the Ottomans, who took Constantinople in 1453. As Gill Page has emphasized in Being Byzantine: Greek Identity before the Ottomans (Cambridge, 2008), a localized identity dominated in most parts of the Byzantine Empire, rather than a Constantinople-centered, imperially-focused identity. Few who have spent time with the rural monuments would disagree with this assessment: they are grounded in place; the stories they have to tell – if we are willing to take the time to listen – are local ones.
Chapter One introduces us to the Late Byzantine village – how to define it, its economy, and its cast of characters, drawing upon written evidence (inscriptions, deeds, chrysobulls) and archaeology, including results of excavation, survey, architectural studies, and painted churches. Chapter Two brings us to the church, which Gerstel places at the heart of the village, and the villagers’ engagement with the sacred, as affected by levels of literacy. She situates the style and iconography of the painted decoration within its local context – legible to and expressive of the hopes and aspirations of the parishioners. The following two chapters examine the evidence for the lives and labors of the village women and men. The harsh realities are evident in the osteopathologies of human skeletal remains, as well as in the imagery in churches – notably scenes of Last Judgment, which reflect acceptable and transgressive behaviours. Chapter Five turns to the role of the village priest in the spiritual life of the community, here drawing upon ethnographies from more recent times for a model. She also turns to the lives of monks and nuns within rural communities – and the thorny problem of how to identify a surviving church as monastic vs. parochial or commemorative. The final chapter turns to the spiritual role of the church as a place of hope and healing, of death and commemoration, and how it might function as an archive of familial and community memory.
Gerstel paints her village in broad strokes, drawing her evidence from across disciplines, across Greece, and across centuries. She is at her best as an art historian, offering us insight and nuance in the analysis of the painted programs – many are published here for the first time, and much that is not new will be unfamiliar to the reader. Few scholars are capable of reading them as clearly as Gerstel. One could only wish for more archaeological data, more landscape archaeology, more architecture – all are employed in limited quantities. Similarly, a more focused study might bring out the differences in economies, structures, and social concerns from one village to another, or from one region to another – her Greek villages are certainly quite different from my Anatolian villages. There is also a danger in presenting the seeming “unchanging nature of rural settlements and the place of the villager within those settlements” – indeed, her framing device (Kyria Kanella) suggests this continues to the present.
But these are minor quibbles – asking for more of a good thing when the author has already given us plenty. The book is engaging, well-illustrated, and timely. We can only hope it will inspire the next generation of scholars to get out of the city and out of the archive to discover the rich body of historical evidence provided by the forgotten rural lives and landscapes of Byzantium.
