Home of the Humanities
At a serene Harvard outpost, scholars find fertile ground for Byzantine, pre-Columbian, and landscape studies.
by Elizabeth Gudrais
Photograph courtesy of Dumbarton Oaks
The main house at Dumbarton Oaks.
On a wintry Wednesday evening, Maria Mavroudi is delivering a lecture on Byzantine science. Using evidence from texts and artifacts, she sketches an alternate history, one that competes with the common account that the Byzantine empire’s inhabitants were less advanced than their contemporaries in their use and understanding of the sciences.
Mavroudi reports that Ptolemy’s Geography, which was produced in Roman Egypt in the second century A.D. and describes a system of coordinates similar to modern latitude and longitude, survives in 54 Greek manuscripts. She argues that the typical explanation of why the text was reproduced—merely to preserve it for future generations—is wrong, and makes a case that the real purpose was to produce a manual for contemporary use. She cites texts that describe the richness of Constantinople’s libraries, and others that mention wooden astrolabes; time and the elements, she says, may have erased the evidence of Byzantium’s use of scientific instruments made from this perishable material. Byzantine science, she says, has gone unacknowledged not because it did not exist, but because studying it requires such diverse expertise: knowledge of languages, of Byzantine history, of the history of science.
This research requires a particular breed of scholar. Mavroudi, Ph.D. ’98, who holds faculty appointments at Berkeley and Princeton, is one of them. She was the first person to earn a doctorate in Byzantine studies, per se, from Harvard; four different departments—history, classics, art history, and Near Eastern studies—were involved. And the setting for her lecture is the world’s foremost center of Byzantine scholarship: Dumbarton Oaks, an estate in Washington, D.C., which Harvard has owned since 1940, when Robert Woods Bliss, A.B. 1900, and his wife, Mildred Barnes Bliss, donated their Georgetown property to the University.
But it is not just in Byzantine studies that Dumbarton Oaks excels. It also has fellowship programs in pre-Columbian studies—focused on Latin America before Europeans arrived—and in garden and landscape studies.
The scholarly institute, with its research library, museum, and public gardens, encompasses such disparate academic pursuits by design. In the preamble to her last will and testament, Mildred Bliss wrote that the estate was to be preserved as a “home of the Humanities, not a mere aggregation of books and objects of art.” The place manages to incorporate the natural environment and the built environment; concepts of art and religion; cultural studies; and considerations of conquest and empire. It is a window into the past, but it reflects on the present.
Photograph courtesy of Dumbarton Oaks
A garden wall at Dumbarton Oaks.
These three seemingly unrelated fields do not just coexist at Dumbarton Oaks; they coalesce. Fellows toil in solitude in their offices, but they also emerge to discuss their projects with other fellows, and they discover parallels between fields. One past symposium investigated Byzantine garden culture; several current fellows’ projects have benefited from such cross-pollination.
For example, one of this year’s pre-Columbian fellows, University College London archaeologist Elizabeth Graham, is writing about the encounter between Europeans and the Maya, using evidence from excavations of the sites of two churches from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, both in modern-day Belize. In conversations with Byzantine fellows, she has been struck by the similarities between early Christianity and the Maya version of Catholicism. “There’s no question that pre-Christian ideas have been incorporated into Catholicism,” says Graham. “It seems to me the Maya are just doing what all the European Christians did—they incorporate local culture with Christian sacred space.”
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | continued >
