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May-June 2008
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< previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 But to the disapproving Europeans, unaware that their own brand of religion was the product of a similar process, the pagan elements of Maya Catholicism looked foreign. “It’s interesting how, whenever there’s this meeting of two worlds, the one that becomes more powerful depicts the other one in a very simplified fashion,” Graham says. “I don’t think most of us realize that when we look at early records. We take them literally.” She sees parallels to this egotistical simplification of other cultures in various periods throughout history, including the contemporary world. The project of another pre-Columbian fellow, Timothy Beach—a Georgetown University professor who teaches courses on climatology, hydrology, soils, geomorphology, and geoarchaeology—incorporates garden and landscape studies: he is investigating Maya agriculture and its impact on the environment. Beach earned his Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota, and says the changes caused there by early European settlers are not unlike the effects of Maya agriculture: German farmers weren’t used to the steeper inclines and fast, hard rainstorms of their new home, and they took no precautions against erosion. In both central Minnesota and Guatemala, entire towns were buried under layers of eroded sediment. 
Photograph courtesy of Dumbarton Oaks A bust of the Maya maize god, from the late seventh or early eighth century, appears in a display about Maya religion in the pre-Columbian wing. Inquiries like these, in a sense, simply couldn’t take place without Dumbarton Oaks. The Renaissance brought a renewed interest in the Classical period; for a time, the millennia in between were forgotten, ignored. By bringing the Byzantine period to the forefront, the Blisses created a place for the study of all the periods, and of the major themes of human history.
Cornelia Horn, a professor in the theological studies department at St. Louis University and a current Byzantine fellow, is trying to trace the transmission history of apocryphal Christian texts during the seventh century. The nativity story appears not only in the Bible, but also in the Koran and in other texts that were not ultimately incorporated into these holy books. Horn’s project compares details in the different versions of the story in an attempt to get at which versions circulated when, where, and how widely. It is a study of a specific story’s evolution, but also of how Christianity and Islam influenced one another. Geographically, the Byzantine empire was ideally situated to illuminate concerns that remain relevant today: interactions between world powers, for instance, or between religious traditions. A former Dumbarton Oaks director, medievalist Giles Constable, once said a stint there should be mandatory for all U.S. ambassadors sent to the Mediterranean and the Middle East. 
Photograph courtesy of Dumbarton Oaks An openwork silver lamp, one of many items in the Byzantine collection from the “Sion Treasure,” liturgical objects and church furnishings from a sixth-century church site found in Turkey. The Blisses were prescient in realizing the importance of Byzantine studies. Dumbarton Oaks welcomed its first Byzantine fellows in 1941, well before the field was widely recognized as a worthy academic pursuit. Alice-Mary Talbot ’60, who directs the Byzantine studies program, says that when she was studying classics in college, focusing on the medieval period “would have been unthinkable.” Today, she notes, the chair of the Harvard classics department is a Byzantinist; the previous chair, and current Dumbarton Oaks director, Jan M. Ziolkowski, also studies the medieval period. Talbot notes, with delight, that Maria Mavroudi won a MacArthur fellowship in 2005—a sign that the field has truly arrived. The list of former fellows reads like a “who’s who” of Byzantine studies, and people tend not to come just once—Dumbarton Oaks keeps beckoning them back. Mavroudi’s first visit was in 1995, as a junior fellow, someone still working on a Ph.D. Her project was analyzing a Byzantine Greek book on dream interpretation and that book’s Arabic sources. In 2001, she returned to research bilingualism in Greek and Arabic in the Middle Ages. Mavroudi says these stints “proved formative for everything I did afterwards.” Talbot, too, has kept coming back. She first fell in love with Byzantium during a fellowship in Greece, and a Ph.D. program in Byzantine history at Columbia brought her to Dumbarton Oaks for the first time, for a symposium in 1963. She spent a year there on a fellowship in 1966, and returned in 1984 to help edit the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, a project whose editorial home base was Dumbarton Oaks. When that project concluded, then-Dumbarton Oaks director Angeliki Laiou, whose professorship in Byzantine history at Harvard was endowed by the Blisses, appointed Talbot director of Byzantine studies. 
Photograph courtesy of Dumbarton Oaks Alice-Mary Talbot, director of the Byzantine studies program Today, Talbot’s office is in one of the Blisses’ guest bedrooms; the walls are lined with titles such as The Crusades from the Perspective of Byzantium and the Muslim World; Byzantine Court Culture; Consent and Coercion to Sex and Marriage in Ancient and Medieval Societies; and Byzantine Magic. All were published by Dumbarton Oaks; the in-house press has helped shape Byzantine studies by issuing important texts and by supporting the writing of others with its fellowships. Dumbarton Oaks commissioned the translation of 19 hagiographies, never before translated into a modern Western language, and is publishing them as a series. Ziolkowski says he would like to see the press create a series of English translations of Byzantine texts, with the original Greek on facing pages, similar to the Loeb Classical Library and the Villa I Tatti Renaissance Library—both published by Harvard University Press, which produces, markets, and distributes Dumbarton Oaks publications. Several current fellows are working on projects that will become resources for future scholars. Nadezhda Kavrus-Hoffmann, an independent scholar from New York who was a fellow last fall, is creating the very first catalog of Greek manuscripts from the Byzantine period in the United States: traveling among the libraries that hold the manuscripts and in some cases discovering texts whose existence had escaped notice. Current fellow Yuri Pyatnitsky, senior curator for the Byzantine icon collection at the Hermitage, in St. Petersburg, is creating a comprehensive catalog of that collection, incorporating information from recent analysis of the icons using new technical methods 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | continued >  
 
 
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