Sailing from Byzantium: How a Lost Empire Shaped the World

click here for more details, find new or used items	Colin Wells Our price £9.67 (£10.75) New from £6.77 Used from £6.09 Pages: 368 (Hardcover) ISBN: 0553803816 Pub: Delacorte Press Pub date: 2006-07-25 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 122469

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If you feel an unsatisfied curiosity about Byzantium, this book is actually a good place to start, precisely because it works from the outside, focussing on the external outreach whereby Byzantine language, culture, and literature reached Italy (sparking the Renaissance), the Muslim world, and the embryonic Slavic world. Underneath that story, the ebb and flow of Byzantium's fortunes, its dark age, and its periods of renaissant literature and religion are sketched lightly but vividly by Wells. This book offers a painless way to get your feet wet in this subject by placing it in a broader world context. After, you're ready for Cyril Mango's superb thematic intro "Byzantium" followed by the historical surveys of John Julius Norwich (short in one volume or long in two). Then, if you're still on board, you can dive into the deep waters of the great John Meyendorff ("Byzantine Theology" and others). Byzantium has been well studied since the 1950s; this book by Colin Wells will serve as your way in.

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