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Nicholas Mesarites - His life and works (in translation) (Hardcover)
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Nicholas Mesarites - His life and works (in translation) (Hardcover)
Series: Translated Texts for Byzantinists, 4
Expected to ship within 9 - 15 working days
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The aim of this book is to make accessible to a wider audience the
works of Nicholas Mesarites, who deserves to be better known than
he is. He was an ecclesiastic, who from the turn of the twelfth
century provides a vivid record from personal experience of his
troubled times, which saw the descent of the Byzantine Empire into
factionalism, the loss of its capital Constantinople in 1204 to the
armies of the fourth crusade, and its eventual reconstitution in
exile as the Empire of Nicaea. Nicholas Mesarites is difficult to
place, because the record he left behind was not that of a
historian, more that of a social commentator. He preferred to
highlight individual incidents and to emphasise personal experience
and family relationships. He does not try to make sense of events;
only to record their immediate impact. His is a fragmented
autobiographical approach, which brings the reader closer to
events, but leaves him to construct the bigger picture for himself;
whether it is an eyewitness account of a palace coup that failed; a
description of the relics of the passion; the memories of a
brother, who became a defender of Orthodoxy; the detailed evocation
of the Church of the Holy Apostles at Constantinople; the portrayal
of his own nervous collapse following the loss of Constantinople; a
character study of an ecclesiastical rival; or not least the
mishaps -often for comical effect - suffered in the course of his
travels. Because he was writing, as he tells us, largely to please
himself, Nicholas Mesarites provides an idiosyncratic view of the
society in which he moved, and, as he was less bound by literary
convention than his contemporaries, he writes with a refreshing
directness.
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