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Sharon E. J. Gerstel , Rural Lives and Landscapes in Late Byzantium: Art, Archaeology, and Ethnography . New York-Cambridge : Cambridge University Press . 2015. Pp.xvi, 207+ 124 illustrations, 3 maps.
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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....