text:
Although Dante never traveled to Greek-speaking lands in the eastern Mediterranean and his exposure to the Greek language was limited, he displays a keen interest in the cultures of Greece, both ancient and medieval, pagan and Christian. Bringing together cartography, history, philosophy, philology, reception studies, religious studies, and other disciplines, these essays tap into knowledge and skills from specialists in the medieval West, Byzantium, and Dante. The twelve contributors discuss the presence of ancient Greek poetry, philosophy, and science (astrology, cosmography, geography) in Dante's writings, as well as the Greek characters who populate his works. Some of these individuals were drawn indirectly from ancient mythography, Homeric epic, and other such sources, while others were historically attested personages, down to Dante's own era. Greek was not only a language and civilization of the past, but also a present (and often rival) religious and political entity. To each layer—ancient pagan, early Christian, and contemporary Byzantine—Latins related differently. Doctrinal, political, linguistic, cultural, and educational matters all played important roles in shaping the attitudes that form the focal point for this volume, which sets the stage for further engagement with Dante's corpus in its cultural settings.]]>
IS: I'm glad you started by asking me about that, because I have been dealing with this theme for half a century. So, I will speak with some detail about it, because it throws light on my stay at Dumbarton Oaks and the various periods of the development of the institute. I conceived of my project, which is Byzantium and the Arabs, when I was a student at Oxford, reading Literae Humaniores, that is, classics and Greek and Roman history. My tutor was a distinguished historian, Nicholas Sherwin-White, and I used to go to the lectures and hear the famous Sir Ronald Syme. I chose as a special subject not the early Greek history, but the one which involved Alexander the Great, because he came to the Near East, where I was born. I was born in the Holy Land; I left in 1946, long before the Arab-Israeli conflict.
So, I took that and I decided to deal with the history of Byzantium and the Arabs; not with the Arabs as such, but to deal with them as a force in Roman history. In other words, the traditional view of the fall of the Roman Empire was to the German tribes in the west in the fifth century, but in the east the Arabs attacked in the seventh century. So, the fall of Rome has to take care of the two thrusts, the German and the Arab. Gibbon in his book put between two stiff covers the two peoples, but then they parted company. The descendants of the Germans, distinguished German scholars nowadays in Germany and in the nineteenth century and the twentieth, have dealt with the German problem. No one has really dealt with the Arabs as part of Roman history. They dealt with it as Arab history or as Islamic history, but not as a theme in the larger theme, the fall of the Roman Empire. This is what I decided to do. And I thought that that would be a worthy theme. It would be both Arab and classical and would do justice to my training.
Then I came to Princeton for my Ph.D., where I did Islamic and Arabic studies. The distinguished Islamic historian Philip Hitti was in his last days, and I added Persian and Turkish to my Arabic, to surround Arabic with a new family of Islamic languages which Islam created. They are unrelated structurally to each other: the one is a Semitic language, the other is an Indo-European language, Persian, and Turkish is a Turkic language, but they are Islamic, united by Islam.
Then I met there the famous distinguished scholar Amerigo Castro, the Spanish scholar who has written important works on the Arab factor in Spain and its importance, and he asked me to help him on the Arabic words in his book on the structure of Spanish history. The atmosphere there was no longer Mohammed and Alexander; it became how the Arabs split the Mediterranean. Everybody was talking about Henri Pirenne and Mohammed and Charlemagne and how the Arabs made Western Europe by the conquest of North Africa and Andalusia.
So, when I received my Ph.D., the department sent me to the Institute for Advanced Study. Ernst Kantorowicz, the famous medievalist, was there. He had just left Berkeley, having quarreled with the administration there about swearing an oath which he didn't want to. So, he said, "You know, it's better for you now at this stage of your development to start with the East rather than with the West – with Andalusia." I wanted to do Arab-Spanish history and try to answer Pirenne's question. I thought then, as I still do, that Pirenne raised the right question, Mohammed and Charlemagne – the Arabs contributed to the rise of Western Europe and Charlemagne – but he may have given the wrong answer. So, I wanted to give the right answer from Arab history, which briefly is that the Arab wall on the Ebro in Andalusia prevented the Carolingians from invading the Mediterranean, and so they stayed in the landmass of Western Europe, and this is how partly Western Europe was created.
So, he said, "Well, you should really apply to Dumbarton Oaks, because then you can deal with the Arabs and the Umayyads in the homeland before you come to the province," which was Spain, and so I came to Dumbarton Oaks. That was in 1954, as a Junior Fellow. 1954-1955. I thought I would stay for a few years there, and then I became so involved in it. I decided that this is the more difficult theme to do, much more difficult than the Arabs, Spain, and Charlemagne, because it was possible to do only by one who had the two sets of sources, the classical as well as the Oriental. In my case, by the accident of birth, I had the Arabic and Islamic, and then by training, I did the classical course. So, I thought, well, this should be done and that it is more difficult than the other one, because it involved dealing with inscriptions and with the various languages – Arabic, Syriac, and Greek and Latin – and it had to do with seals and coins, which is very time-consuming. So, I decided to stay in this field, but I didn't realize it would take that long. However, I'm glad I did.
So, this set what my project would be: Byzantium and the Arabs, especially in the seventh century, the rise of Islam and the Arab attack. And then I said, "Well, how can I deal with this without dealing with the centuries before the rise of Islam?" This had been a blank, only a few references here and there. The German scholar Nöldeke has done a classic on one Arab group, the Ghassanids. So, I decided to do the centuries before the rise of Islam on all the Arab groups involved with Byzantium.
My project became tripartite; so I divided it into: Rome and the Arabs from the settlement of Pompeii until Constantine, and then the middle period, Byzantium and the Arabs from Constantine to Heraclius, and then the third part, which is the climax, the rise of Islam and the Arab conquest. So, far I have finished one and two in six volumes, and volume seven is being now prepared for publication, which will bring to a close part two. Byzantion in Belgium has published three volumes collecting my articles, which are collateral with the six volumes, so we have now almost ten volumes on these three centuries. These have their own identity as contributions to late antiquity, but they are more importantly prolegomena for the rise of Islam and the Arab conquest, the climax of my work, which I hope to finish in the next few years. I have done most of the researches; it is a matter of reflecting on it and writing it; and if it has one virtue, it will be because I'll be the first historian to have filled the gap of all these centuries with my gaze fixed on the seventh to know exactly what happened and why it happened the way it did. My work will be facilitated by the two important works which have appeared by Fred Donner and Walter Kaegi on the Arab conquest, but I will treat problems which have not been done by them and which have been left out. In my hands, I think, there are the answers to the big questions of the Arab conquest: one of them is the incomprehensible victory of the Arabs over not only one empire, but two empires: Byzantium and Sassanid Persia, which they challenged and defeated, both within two years. So, it is an incomprehensible victory. This is part of my job to elucidate.
So, much for my work, which has been done here. It could have been done only at Dumbarton Oaks, because here is the major center for Byzantine studies. I keep telling Junior Fellows who come here when they are bored sometimes, "Now, look here. Napoleon said, 'Ask me for anything except time,' and scholarship is energy and time. One hour's work here is worth five hours' work elsewhere." And I give them an example: when I was in Oxford in 2001 for my sabbatical, I think one of my volumes – the last volume was printed in 2002 – was being done by the copy editor, and he asked me about a reference; I couldn't find it. I ran from my college, St. John's, to Balliol to the Ashmolean and to the Bodleian – couldn't find it. So, I called Glenn Ruby, in Publications at D.O., and I told him, "Glenn, please go to the third floor of the Main Building and look it up for me." So, he did it in five minutes, and then it was done. Working in Dumbarton Oaks is a great privilege, and it is a great economy in time.
Well, I think I have given you now how my work is related to Dumbarton Oaks and how Dumbarton Oaks has made it possible. Now, you want to see how the administration reacted to my work: when I came here, Dumbarton Oaks was in the hands of art historians, and it was natural, because it started as a museum. The director, Mr. Thacher, was an art historian too – although he was not an academic, but he had a degree in art, I think Spanish art – painting. And Miss Der Nersessian, who was then acting director in '54 after the death of A. Friend, was an art historian, Armenian. And then E. Kitzinger was a distinguished art historian; he became the director. So, there was little interest in my work, and the other scholars who were not art historians were not interested in it. Then I had some trouble.
When I came in 1954, Dumbarton Oaks had asked a distinguished French scholar, Marius Canard, who had worked on Byzantium and the Arabs. So, I felt at home with him, he was a very good man, and very helpful, and he came to look at the Nachlass of a distinguished Russian scholar, Vasiliev, who had worked on Byzantium and the Arabs, and unfortunately for me, he had died before I came. In other words, if he had been here when I came to D.O., the administration would have been more understanding of what I was doing.
Marius Canard understood my work, and I contracted a friendship with him until the end of his life, as I did with Speros Vryonis, who was with me as a Junior Fellow, and we still correspond. In the second semester I felt in a vacuum. I worked with Mr. Downey, Glanville Downey, who was a scholar here, but who had no interest in the Arabs. He was a very competent scholar, but a very difficult man. I understand he used to see a psychiatrist. If you made a mistake with him, he became angry. Let me give you an example: there was a Fellow, Byron Tsangadis, who came to work with him. He had an appointment with him, and he came three minutes late, so he kicked him out; he told him, "I cannot waste three minutes of my short life on earth waiting for you, so come tomorrow at the exact time." So, the poor man came two or three minutes before, so he kicked him out again. He told him, "Come exactly at the same time, at the time I wanted you to come."
In any case, he had also difficulty with the most distinguished man in Dumbarton Oaks, the leading Byzantinist of his generation, Cyril Mango. He picked him up from Turkey, because he noticed that he was precocious: he had written an article when he was, I think, twenty-one years old, and Downey said, "Well, we must bring him to Dumbarton Oaks." Then he had the same trouble with him – I get this from both Mango and from Julia Warner, who was the editor of Dumbarton Oaks Papers: Mango corrected him on the translation of, I think, the word teleosis, and Downey thought it meant "perfection" and Mango thought it meant "death," the "dormition of Virgin Mary." He became very unfriendly to him. Julia Warner told me that he used to sing his praises and then all of a sudden he said, "We cannot have him here, because his German is not very good, and you must read German to be a good Byzantinist." So, nobody, of course, listened to him: Miss Der Nersessian and everybody knew that Mango was a distinguished young scholar, precocious, and came to his support.
Well, I had the same problem with him; I forgot what was the problem, and he became rather unpleasant. And I presented him with an essay on Procopius. Procopius, as you may know, is the main historian of the reign of Justinian, and I discovered many mendacities he said about the Arabs in his work, so I collected them and wrote an essay. He was negative towards it; it was very strange, and I said, "Fine." Then I had an appointment to go to UCLA to teach. I sent the same article, but with footnotes and appendices, to the BZ, the Byzantinische Zeitschrift, the foremost Byzantine periodical, and F. Dölger loved it, but the article I gave Downey was without footnotes then, because I wanted him to know the substance of my argument. It has been described by some of my friends as one of the most influential articles I have written, the one which Downey had reported negatively on. However, Downey was a decent man; he became very friendly later and he gave me every support writing recommendations.
When I was teaching at UCLA, Sir Hamilton left Oxford; he gave up his Laudian Professorship of Arabic and accepted the Jewett Professorship of Arabic at Harvard and became a University Professor. He was a giant in every sense, physically and otherwise. So, my fortunes with the administration improved. Since he was an Arabicist/Islamist, he could understand and so appreciate what I was doing, and he asked me to participate in the first symposium of 1963, Byzantium and the Arabs. That was truly exciting. Mrs. Bliss herself wrote me a letter; she said, "This is the only lecture I enjoyed. Will you please send me your lecture?" So, I sent it to her and she sent me a letter, which I still have, in which she thanked me for the lecture. And so I contracted a friendship with her since then, until she died in the late '60s. Unfortunately Sir Hamilton disappeared; he had a stroke and went back to England.
In the '60s I was a little diverted (not entirely) from Byzantium and the Arabs. The Teubner Classical Series asked me to do a speech by Themistius which survived only in an Arabic translation, so I had to prepare it for the Teubner, and it appeared in 1974 in volume three of Themistii Orationes.
Something more important happened: when I came again as a Senior Fellow when Gibb was still at Harvard, I discovered in the library of Dumbarton Oaks a reference to a most precious manuscript, Syriac manuscript – which has been ignored by all the South Arabian scholars and by all the Syrologists – on the persecution of the Christians in South Arabia before the rise of Islam. I immediately wrote to the patriarch in Jerusalem and then we got the manuscript from there. It turned out to be a translation into Arabic of the original Syriac, and we wanted the original Syriac, so he traced it to Damascus to Istanbul to Mardin and finally we found it; it had returned to Damascus and finally we got it. I translated it with an extensive commentary.
The Bollandistes, the Société des Bollandistes, asked me to submit it to them, and they published it as number 49 in their Subsidia Hagiographica as The Martyrs of Najrân. It is a very important volume, because it opened the dossier on the importance of Najrân as the major Christian center in Pre-Islamic Arabia, which was radiating Christianity to all the Peninsula. So, those who talk about Koranic Christology and how the Arabs got to know about what Christians call unorthodox views of Christianity depend on Najrân; and so the Najrân problem is now open, and everybody's talking about Najrân and its Martyrium Arethae from different perspectives.
In the '70s I was still dealing with Byzantium and the Arabs on the side, but these two volumes had taken most of my time in the '60s. In the '70s Giles Constable became the director. Now here for the first time the Director was not an art historian. Before him was Loerke, who was an art historian, and Kitzinger, and Der Nersessian had been an art historian. Giles Constable was a medievalist, a historian who had worked with the Islamicist, J. Kritzeck, so he had a clear conception of the importance of Islam. He looked at my work and he saw my publications, the Teubner and the Bollandistes, and what the BZ had published, and so he appointed me as an Associate Fellow. But since I came to Washington from UCLA and Indiana in 1963 as a professor at Georgetown University, there was no need to apply for fellowships, because I am here, and it's only a ten minutes' walk from Georgetown. And this is the big bargain of being at Georgetown, because Dumbarton Oaks is close. I do my other work there, Arabic poetry and Koranic studies at Georgetown, and I do Byzantino-arabica at D.O.
Giles Constable made me an Associate Fellow because he thought of me as a historian who is dealing with a major theme, Byzantium and the Arabs. I reverted to working on my theme now for volumes, not for articles. So, since then and for the last twenty-five years or so, I have been able to publish these six volumes: Rome and the Arabs, which dealt with the first part of my trilogy, and the second part, the Byzantine one, from Constantine to Heraclius, the five volumes which have appeared, and the sixth will appear, hopefully next summer. This was made possible because of working conditions here at Dumbarton Oaks.
A propos of Constable and me: in addition to my representing the Orient, Christian as well as Islamic, Giles Constable also felt that I was a liaison between Dumbarton Oaks and Georgetown. Why? Because there was that program of joint appointments between Dumbarton Oaks and various universities, which is still going on. I spoke very strongly with the administration at Georgetown for having Frank Trombley, who was there for three years, to be there.
When my last book comes out, then I will work on the climax of my work in two volumes, one on the rise of Islam, the big questions which only the Byzantine sources can give. And I have collected all the references. And then the second one – the Arab conquest, the incomprehensible victory of the Arabs both in Syria and in Egypt, which split the Mediterranean. So, this is then my work here, and I need your prayers to finish them. Do I have them? Because I crossed the Rubicon of longevity recently, so I am an octogenarian now!!
Well, so much then for my work. You said you wanted to know something about the directors and what I think of them. As you know, I have seen Der Nersessian, Ernst Kitzinger, Ihor Ševčenko, Romilly Jenkins, William Loerke, Giles Constable, Robert Thomson, Angeliki Laiou, and then Edward Keenan, and then our current director, Professor Jan Ziolkowski. Now, of all these people – and all these were distinguished scholars – the one who really attended to the problems of Dumbarton Oaks, the first one to do so, was Giles Constable. Let me tell you what he has done.
First of all, this building in which we are sitting was a scandal. In other words, it had one bathroom here and most of the people had to come to this one, and it was not even closed. So he renovated the building, made of it eight self-contained apartments upstairs, and so it became a place where scholars would come and live here. That's one thing he did.
Then he started the idea of summer fellowships. You know, these are very, very valuable. Many scholars in Europe and elsewhere may not be able to come during the term, and so the summer provides them with the time to come to Dumbarton Oaks, do what they want. And, as you know, Dumbarton Oaks has become a pilgrimage center, when you come to Dumbarton Oaks, especially from Europe. So, the summer fellowships are very important.
And then he restructured the administration of Dumbarton Oaks. Dumbarton Oaks used to be ruled by the director, then he instituted the Senior Fellows Committee, which includes scholars from various parts of the world, who get together and discuss problems.
Then even the gardens: he said those who visit the gardens should pay at least a nominal fee in order to pay for the upkeep; so like all people of a powerful mind, he had interest in details too, not only in the general problems.
I think there's something else which is his achievement – let me see [looks at notes]. The lunches used to be formal; they used to be sit-down lunches. He thought that was good, but you know, a buffet is better, when people can come not only precisely at 12:00 or half past 12, say, but between 12 and 1, and then they can serve themselves. So, he's the one who started the buffet.
Because of the five things he did for D.O., it renders utterly untrue the charge that Constable wanted to move D.O. to Harvard.
Robert Thomson did something very good. Where the museum is now had been open: there was no roof. He roofed it, and he started what has become D.O.'s splendid museum. So, this is to his credit. And before he retired as director, he recommended that D.O. cannot be run by a director only: you need a director for the entire establishment, which is tripartite in structure – Byzantine, Landscape Architecture, and Pre-Columbian – and you need a director of studies for each of these three divisions.
By the way, Giles Constable also paid attention to Pre-Columbian Studies, which was the Cinderella of the three, and he gave it prominence, and I think the Pre-Columbian scholars appreciated that. Elizabeth Boone was then the main figure there, and so that speaks well for him. Although he is a medieval historian, yet he was genuinely interested in other periods of history. I keep telling our Pre-Columbian friends, "We are not so distant from each other, the Byzantine and the Pre-Columbian, because both of us chronologically are Pre-Columbian, because Byzantium existed before 1492!"
Angeliki's contribution was to buy the La Quercia. Before, visitors to Dumbarton Oaks used to be housed in an apartment house on Wisconsin Avenue. It was not good at all; I mean, the conditions were bad. So, she decided to buy the apartment building. La Quercia, as you know, in Italian relates with Dumbarton Oaks: the same as the word "oaks," La Quercia. The only thing about La Quercia, which I gather from those who live in it, is its distance; because I have a car, I used to drive many of the Fellows, especially the ladies, in winter at night to it. It takes a good ten minutes' walk to reach it from the Main Building. So, I thought that in the future maybe Dumbarton Oaks can sell it and buy something close. S Street should all be Dumbarton Oaks. There are houses which are in the market for selling on the corner. It will be difficult, but I think Professor Keenan did well to buy one house at S St., because it is not only the director's house, it is useful for other functions and also for visiting scholars.
Director Edward Keenan, as you know, was a Russian scholar.
ABF: Yes.
IS: He was also understanding of my project, because he had done some Arabic, and he was the dean or the director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies at Harvard. So, he was very supportive. And he, of course, did the major part in creating Dumbarton Oaks as it is. He realized there is a big endowment for Dumbarton Oaks, and money's function is to be used, so instead of having it in banks, let it be used. And everybody first did not take kindly to the renovation, but now they are reconciled. They know it was a great achievement. Some think it lost its intimacy and closeness, but you know this is a research institute. It has many redeeming virtues, and I think that this is a great plus for Ned, the reconstruction of Dumbarton Oaks. Now everybody comes and wonders at it.
The present director, Jan Ziolkowski, has inherited what Giles Constable had done in administration and what Edward Keenan had done in the physical plant. And he is the ideal one now, because he is not an art historian. I don't mean to speak pejoratively about art historians; I mean, his sympathies are wider. Jan Ziolkowski is a classicist to start with; Ned was not a classicist, I think. He's a classicist and he is a medievalist, and of course Byzantium is part of medieval history, especially its relations with the West, with Western European history. He's open-minded, he takes an active part in the life and work of the Fellows, and he lunches quite often with them. He also has done some Arabic, so he appreciates my work and I feel that for writing the climax of my work, he is the ideal director. Let me give you an example of how he is aware of what can be done now for Dumbarton Oaks, and he discusses this with members of his academic community.
I spoke with him about the most important things that Dumbarton Oaks, as far as research is concerned, can do as an institute. I told him the most important project which Dumbarton Oaks has done started with Giles Constable when, under the direction of Alexander Kazhdan, Dumbarton Oaks did the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. Although it's called the Oxford Dictionary, it's Dumbarton Oaks. These three volumes have done more for Byzantine history, for promoting Byzantine studies in the Anglo-Saxon world and elsewhere, than any other book. Better than the German Pauly-Wissowa, which is a great work, but you know it is so difficult to use it. There are many volumes, and the print is not so clear. But the ODB is so beautifully printed, clearly printed. I told him this was done in 1992, so it is utterly out of date. These are the most important three volumes which Dumbarton Oaks has done for the promotion of Byzantine studies. It needs a supplement, as even Pauly-Wissowa has a supplement, the new Pauly-Wissowa, even the smaller one is there. I told him what is needed is a supplement. Of the many fellowships you give, ten or whatever, give one or two to a scholar who will spend a year, either at home or doing it here, corresponding with all the authors who have written these articles asking them what new bibliographies have appeared, what new researches have been done. If they are dead, you can ask somebody else. Also, there are many mistakes in it. I have myself listed some of them, many of them. So, this is the first and the most important thing that should be done. I think the Senior Fellows Committee should attend to this.
Then I told him, "You know, Byzantine studies would not have prospered in this country had it not been for the Blisses." We made a joke about this. I told him, "Well, if Mrs. Bliss was more fertile and she had a child, maybe she would not have donated the estate to Harvard." We are not writing an essay in praise of sterility – no, no. We are very happy that this happened, so their memory should be perpetuated in a way which will keep their memory alive. You can have a bust for them in the entrance, you can have a picture of them in the Founders Room, but I suggest having a series called the Bliss Byzantine Library. Mr. Loeb – I think he was a banker or some such profession – endowed the publication of the famous Loeb Classical Series, and the Classics Department at Harvard operates it. And this has been a great success. I said, "The Bliss Byzantine Library would be the best 'thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Bliss, for what have you done,' because the people will use it all the time, and the word 'Bliss' will be very visible."
Now, of course the volumes which appeared in the Loeb Classical Library are more important in a sense than the Byzantine ones, more important in the sense that they have more popular appeal, but there is enough in Byzantine history to justify having a smaller number of books there, and the Loeb Classical Library has hijacked some of the works which belong to Byzantium. Let me give you an example. Ammianus Marcellinus is the first – his Res Gestae. He is Byzantine, he worked when Constantine and Constantius ruled. So, he should be re-done in the Byzantine Bliss series. Procopius: everybody would love Procopius! Everybody loves it: gossip – it's too human to be suppressed. So, the works of Procopius should be re-done, with so much scholarship now done on them, and published; there are other fragmentary historians. So you can have a perhaps smaller Byzantine Bliss Library.
Director Ziolkowski said a Medieval Bliss Library would be an alternative possibility, because in one of her inscriptions on the outer wall of D.O., Mrs. Bliss talks about the medieval humanities. She emphasized the word "medieval." So, he thought this one will perpetuate the memory of this couple who have given such an impetus – not only in America, but in the whole world – to Byzantine studies.
And then the third point I discussed with him concerned the symposia which are held. Sometimes these symposia deal with problems which may interest a member of the senior committee, but it should have a more universal appeal and a more important one. I gave him an example. There was a time when I think there was a symposium on Anatolia and Oriens. There is no relationship between the two of them – two dioceses. And then even Oriens, half of it was in the Byzantine period and half of it was in the Islamic. It was interesting, but the papers were not published, apparently, because it was not a successful symposium. Its conception was not a sound conception, as interesting as it was: either Oriens or Anatolia would have been much better. I said symposia should deal with major problems, and I gave him an example. I told him, to use that cliché, the mission civilisatrice of Byzantium, its civilizing mission, was the translation of the Bible to every new people that was converted to Christianity: the Slavs, Cyril and Methodios; the Goths, Ulfilas; the Armenians; the Georgians; the Copts; the Ethiopians. Whenever the Bible was translated (and Byzantium actively, positively, and aggressively favored the translation of the Bible), then a Christian literature exploded in all these literatures.
This is not unknown, but so much new research has been done on each of these translations that there is need for having a symposium on all of them to show the extent of the mission civilisatrice. When you bring them together, when you publish that in Dumbarton Oaks Papers, it would be a beautiful thing for an art historian to see the various scripts. You can take, for instance, a page from Genesis or a page from St. John in Old Slavonic, in Old Gothic, in Armenian, in Georgian, in Coptic, in Arabic, in Syriac, in Ethiopian, to display them. It is a theme which inspires so many areas of research. And then I told him, "What about Byzantium and Islam?" There are about eight centuries: four with the Arab-Byzantine conflict, from the seventh until the 11th, and then the Turkish one from the 11th until the 15th when Mohammed the Conqueror captured Constantinople in 1453. This is a theme which needs to be telescoped and to be freshly understood. This is not to say the themes which have been dealt with in previous symposia are not important; they are. But I feel that more attention should be paid to the Orient, because Byzantium is in the Pars Orientalis.
This, by the way, brings me also back to how Giles Constable, being a historian, understood my relevance here. He looked at me as representing the Orient. In other words, because of my knowledge of Arabic, Syriac, and Persian, I am here to write on this and also to help Fellows in their areas when they come. Invariably, whenever a Junior Fellow, or not only a Junior Fellow, scholars and Senior Fellows would come, they always have Arabic problems. Even last year I spent some time with one of the students of Angeliki Laiou, a Turkish gentleman, correcting his translations.
Perhaps you might like to hear how the outside world looks at Dumbarton Oaks as it used to be when you had about ten scholars and now after those have left.
CW: Yes.
IS: When I came here two or three times the first two decades, there was an impressive number of scholars who were working here. Cyril Mango was here, Ihor Ševčenko was here, Romilly Jenkins, Glanville Downey, Milton Anastos, Paul Underwood, and above all, there was Father Dvornik, the most colorful of all the scholars.
So, let me tell you something about Father Dvornik. Father Dvornik was a Czech ecclesiastical historian, and he used to live in this cottage here. It makes a lot of difference, especially for Junior Fellows, to come and be inspired by these people and talk to them. As far as Father Dvornik is concerned, he was at heart a peasant and remained a peasant until the end of his life here. Although he lived most of his life in an English-speaking country, he never mastered English. "Frankly say" – "frankly say," translating from French, was his favorite phrase. And then he was a great cook; he used to invite people for supper. And then he was fond of a whiskey, of a scotch, called VAT, and he used to say this was the telephone of the Vatican! And I told him once, "Father, someone called the other day and asked about you, but he thought your name was Father Dvořák," the composer. He laughed and said, "Well, fine, we are very proud of Dvořák." Many outsiders used to think that his name was Dvořák.
And then he used to tell us how surprised some of the saleswomen were. He had nieces in Czechoslovakia who would write to him to buy for them nylon stockings; the nylons had come into existence then. So, he would go to buy stockings, and then the girls would look at this priest who would buy stockings for women; it was very embarrassing for him.
However, we miss him; he used to go every year to Czechoslovakia, and he was lucky. The last time he went, he died in his village in his homeland in his bed. I think he had a heart attack. So this was Dumbarton Oaks as it used to be.
And then we used to have lunches here, sit-down lunches and dinners, served, and Miss Der Nersessian used to preside with a bell; she used to ring a bell and the waiters would come. And once I put a little piece of cloth in the bell and it didn't ring, so we all laughed at her. She had a sister called Araxie, and she was a good cook. And there were two Armenias: Armenia Maior and Armenia Minor, and we used to refer to Sirarpie as Armenia Maior and to Araxie as Armenia Minor, and we used to refer to Father Dvornik as Moravia – he was very fond of it. And he created a Slavic atmosphere in the house, especially when Father Meyendorff used to come here. And then, of course, when Alexander Kazhdan came, it was very Slavic, and we used to call the West Cottage the Slavic lodge, the Slavic cottage, because all the Slavs used to live here.
We must say something about Alexander Kazhdan a propos of resident senior scholars, when in the '70s it was decided to disband these scholars and spend the money on fellowships. This was justified up to a certain point, but as you see, the institute lost that scholarly weight it had by the concentration of talent. In any case, in my opinion, it did more good than harm, because when these scholars disappeared – for instance Downey to Indiana, Milton Anastos to UCLA, Cyril to Oxford – they created new centers for Byzantine studies in these universities. There wasn't anything in Indiana before Downey went there, there wasn't anything in UCLA before Anastos went, and Oxford was rather sleepy as far as Byzantine studies was concerned. Cyril's presence made the difference. So, I think that the dispersion of the scholars, and the diaspora – you could call it the diaspora of the scholars – was helpful in that sense.
When Alexander came in the '80s, he functioned more or less as a senior scholar with whom others could consult. And as I said, a most fruitful project was the dictionary, the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. The ODB is a product of both Constable's initiation and Kazhdan's writing most of its articles and acting as its editor.
You ask me about the Blisses. I am one of the people who remember the two Blisses, and as you know, she was the predominant partner as far as the Bliss visibility in Dumbarton Oaks was. She used to come to the teas and she used to talk to the Fellows.
By the way, there used to be teas, afternoon tea at 4:00, in the Founders' Room where the Study is. It was a very colorful room, and her formidable presence was felt; we enjoyed her conversation, she spoke perfect French, she was a highly cultured woman. And so she created a certain atmosphere, and it's interesting to see the books she used to read – old-fashioned now from our point of view – it will tell you what people of her age used to read so many years ago.
I must not forget to say that when William Tyler was here, he was of special interest to her, because his father, Royall Tyler, used to be Mrs. Bliss's boyfriend. And one saying has survived from Mr. Royall Tyler – I think it was his son William who told me. By the way, we got on very well, because he was a very talented linguist; he served as ambassador to Holland, and he went the length of learning Dutch. You know everyone in Holland speaks English, French, and German, but he decided to learn Dutch, which impressed the Dutch so much, who said, here is an American ambassador who learnt our language. His mother was an Italian contessa, so he was already bilingual. So, here is what his father said about marrying into money: "The bonds of love are never so strong as when the links are made of gold."
What else would you like to hear? Let's see whether I have left anything. I think we talked about the directors, the Blisses – oh yes! The Center for Hellenic Studies.
ABF: Yes.
IS: I have always been interested in curricular development. I don't like administration, I have no talent for numbers or the practical aspects of administration, but I like curricular development. So when I came here in '54, another family other than the Blisses wanted to do what the Blisses had done: they endowed some money for a center which was to be in Washington – I forgot the name of the family. So, what should the center be? I gave them, as my opinion, it should not be classical, it should not be Byzantine, it should be a Hellenistic center. If that became a Hellenistic center, then Harvard would have three centers which will take care of the entire Greek heritage: the pagan classical, the department in Cambridge; the Hellenistic, which came after the Hellenic, after the conquest of Alexander for three centuries of the Macedonian period and three centuries of the Roman until Constantine; and then Dumbarton Oaks, Byzantine. They will be complementary to one another.
And I said, "I do not know whether there is any Hellenistic center in the world just called 'Hellenistic'." It is usually lumped together with other periods of Greek history. And I remember none other than W. Jaeger, the distinguished refugee German scholar, who was interested in Arabic – I don't know why; I think because he taught Walzer, the Jewish refugee who went to Oxford and became the professor there of Arabic philosophy and who had been both a classical scholar and an Orientalist. So, he said to me, "You know, I agree with you, but Harvard doesn't seem to want this." However, it became a Hellenic center for the classical period. Not all its directors were distinguished. I think one of the most distinguished was – what was his name? the Yale man who wrote on Greek tragedy and who fought in the Guerra Civil in Spain; oh, what is his name? It's on the tip –
CW: Bernard Knox.
IS: Yes, yes, Bernard Knox. He was really a very good man, distinguished. But now it is also under another distinguished scholar, Gregory Nagy. Do you know why? – because he brings something new to the study of Greek poetry, because he is a trained linguist. I mean linguist in the strict sense of the science of linguistics, and he is abreast of all of the breakthroughs in the discipline of linguistics, so he's applying all this to the study of Greek classical poetry. And he's married to a lady who's an Iranist, Holly. She is also a very good scholar in Iranian studies; she wrote on the epic of the Persians, the Shāhnāmé.
So, Greg is a distinguished director, and I think he justifies that the center deals with classical Hellenism, although I hope that he will pay some attention to the Hellenistic period, because it is the child of classical Hellenism, after the torch of Hellenism was carried by Alexander.
As I told you, I have a great love for Alexander, because I did him as a special subject in Oxford, and I always read Arrian, his inspiring history of Alexander, in my study of Christian theology and its relations to the Koran. Few people realize that Alexander contributed one of the most important words for Christian theology, and no one I think has mentioned this: the word logos! You know, the word logos which appears in not the Synoptic Gospel, but the Gospel of St. John; we owe to Alexander. If Greek had not spread, the word logos would not have been at the disposal of Christian theologians for dealing with the mystery of the incarnation and the mystery of Christ's being the logos. When you translate it into English as "the word," it loses its meaning, it doesn't mean "the word," it means both "word" and "reason" only in Greek, and when you translate it into Arabic as kalimah, it spreads theological confusion.
CW: We should take a break, because the tape is about to run out.
IS: Yes, we are about finished now. I have been thinking of answering two problems about Alexander: the question of the brotherhood of man. I have no doubt that the old controversy between Professor Tarn and Professor Badian, our distinguished scholar, whether Alexander wanted the brotherhood to be between the Persians and the Greeks or whether he wanted a universal brotherhood. I had delivered a Mellon lecture called "Mohammed and Alexander" thinking that Badian was correct. Now after so many years, I have come to the conclusion that Tarn is correct and I will deliver a lecture on the brotherhood of man as conceived by Alexander by bringing several new points not mentioned before in this controversy.
The other problem is Alexander's sexual orientation. Many people have thought that Alexander was homosexual. I don't think so. I have now so many new points which have never been brought even by Mr. Cartledge, the Cambridge historian who wrote so well on Alexander; there are so many elements which I think support the view that his sexual orientation was heterosexual.
Well, thank you for having me, and I enjoyed it. I think that my six volumes, which will soon be seven, and my three volumes published by Byzantion, I owe to Dumbarton Oaks and to Mrs. Bliss and Mr. Bliss. Dumbarton Oaks's self-image has been "the most civilized square mile in America," and I truly believe in that. Thank you for having me reminiscing on it. "Poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility," as Wordsworth said.
CW: Thank you.
ABF: Thank you very much. You answered all our questions.]]>
AC: Thank you.
JWC: How did you first come to be involved with Dumbarton Oaks?
AC: Well, it goes back a long time, because, I think, my first very clear memory of Dumbarton Oaks is 1955, I think – it may have been 1954 – when I was a junior high school student. My father's cousin, Hugo Buchthal, had a fellowship here, and my father was very fond of Hugo, and so we came to visit him here; and I confess, my memory of that place, with its sort of owl-eyed, European-looking, terribly earnest people, seemed little short of bizarre. And had anyone told me at that moment that my future life would be involved with Dumbarton Oaks, I think I would have frozen in terror. But that relationship between my father and Hugo Buchthal was in fact very germinal for my own life. My father enjoyed his relationship with Hugo very much, was very interested in his work, and so when, as a college student, I became interested in the Middle Ages, it just seemed to me that everything I was taught in college was hopelessly incomplete, because, somehow, the crank that was making western Europe turn, I believed, was being turned farther east. And so I retained the sort of curiosity about what was happening in this place called Byzantium. Then, after I graduated from college, I went to the Walters Art Gallery and professed to be interested in the influence of Byzantium on the West; and Ernst Kitzinger, who knew my mother, said that I could come and use the library. And at this point, coming back, it was absolutely magic; it was just remarkable. He would let me sit up at the reading room, at a big table – I could surround myself with books – and he invited me to the 1964 symposium on the Crusader art, which was one of the great symposia. So, I went off to graduate school to study the impact of Byzantium on the West, but soon thereafter decided that you couldn't really study the impact of Byzantium on the West without knowing what Byzantium was, and that's been the question I've been pursuing ever since.
JWC: So, do you remember any of the things you encountered on that first trip you made here that may have come back when you started to study here, things that seemed inconsequential that you then realized would be instrumental to your learning.
AC: I think unquestionably the sense of intellectual commitment, which just pervaded – I got the sense that this was – if you wanted to be intellectually committed, boy this was the place for that. I found the objects in the museum just inscrutable. And at that point, in '54, I liked anything the ladies wore – large, big skirts and lots of fabric. And sort of – some silver plates, some busted stones? I couldn't understand what people were interested in.
JWC: And do you think that the interest you later developed in the West and then in the East was influenced at all by these early experiences you had, where you didn't necessarily know but later, or was it something you developed on your own?
AC: I'm sure that, from the eager conversations between my father and Hugo Buchthal, that curiosity was instilled at that point. It took shape very, very slowly.
JWC: Now when you came back as an undergraduate, were there any other people who, like you, maybe knew a scholar here and just came to visit, or were the people you were interacting with primarily Fellows and visiting scholars?
AC: Actually, when I came back to use the library in '64, I think the only person I really interacted with at all was Ernst Kitzinger once, and otherwise I just tried to make myself inconspicuous, because I did feel extremely exceptional and privileged. It wasn't until I was a Junior Fellow in 1970-'71 that my fellow Junior Fellows – Gary Vikan, Leslie MacCoull, John Wiita – began to become a circle of Byzantinist acquaintances.
JWC: Now, before we get to the time you spent here as an actual Fellow, can you tell us a little bit about that '64 symposium? Because, you know, there seem to have been a few rapid-fire ones in the early '60s where big things seemed to be happening.
AC: Yes, they were very dramatic, and – well, I mean, just from walking into the Music Room and discovering an audience in which people, when they arrived, got into the middle of the row. Rows were very close together, and it was difficult to crawl over – and I thought, this must be the most intelligent audience I've ever seen. So, I went into the middle of a row and sat there; and a tall, handsome, white-haired man in the front of the room came striding down the central aisle crying, "Kurt! Kurt!" And I suddenly realized, that was Ihor Ševčenko, and "Kurt" had to be Weitzmann! I watched with enormous, you know, just fascination; and then to watch with this sense of incredible newness of every paper, and the hush and then the babble of curiosity which followed them, I found quite remarkable.
JWC: Have you seen things like that since, or was that a unique experience that's difficult to recreate?
AC: I think that I've seen symposia in which portions became that incandescent, and I guess one keeps coming back looking for that. In this past symposium, I found the sequence of Parker's paper and then Maxwell's paper produced for me that kind of incandescence – that suddenly very disparate things came together with combustion, which is very exciting.
JWC: So, can you tell us a little bit about the developments you think have occurred in this field that couldn't otherwise have come about without symposia like that, where you had these minds in the room that collaborate and just come up with something new.
AC: I think that – for me, I find it hard to imagine Byzantine studies, really, independently of the sort of fertilization, which has emerged from Dumbarton Oaks. The sort of Crusader development was certainly one of the major things. Then there was the work on Justinian; Van Nice's work on Hagia Sophia that generated extraordinary interest; the emergence of the seals projects has been just remarkable to follow. I think that the, for me, very germinal was, for instance, a colloquium which Angeliki Laiou had, "Byzantium in the Modern Greek Tradition," which sort of opened up an entire tradition in Byzantine studies which I found extremely dynamic. The Dumbarton Oaks Summer Institutes, paleography and numismatics, I think, have been, again for me, just sort of points of, for one thing, meeting other people who are interested in it, but also just opening up dimensions of questions that hadn't been there before.
JWC: So, with all this background, you came to Dumbarton Oaks in – '77 you said?
JWC: '70-'71, I'm sorry. Now, with the other Fellows that you were studying with at the time, had any of them had similar experiences with Dumbarton Oaks in the past, or were they being introduced to the institute for the first time?
AC: I don't know with Leslie MacCoull and with John Wiita. I know that Gary Vikan, through his work with Kurt Weitzman, probably had been in and out of the place before.
JWC: And knowing all of what Dumbarton Oaks had to offer, how did you first start to pursue your studies? Was your study here influenced in any way by the resources that you knew were here?
AC: I think that the first Junior Fellowship – I think I came to understand – I arrived here after I had a fellowship year abroad pursuing my dissertation topic, in which it became clear to me that I needed to do things that I was unprepared for. I think it was getting here that I began to understand what it was that was going on, that I would come into – I was working on manuscripts – come into manuscript studies thinking it was art history, because you look at the pictures – if a book didn't have pictures I would turn it back – and at that moment, was just really on the point where, thanks to Hugo Buchthal, who agreed to ride herd on my dissertation even though I was not his student, the practice of codicology was sort of taking over the study of manuscripts; and it was coming here that – particularly Cyril Mango and Ihor Ševčenko made me realize, no, you really have to take a book as a whole, you really do have to settle down, you need to learn paleography, you need to learn much better Greek, and I came to understand what the study of a book is. So, I think it was kind of an answer to a prayer, in a sense. Fortunately the next year my husband got a fellowship abroad, and I was able to go back and look at many of the manuscripts again, and approach them in whole new way.
JWC: That's very interesting. Do you feel that Dumbarton Oaks plays a similar role for a lot of scholars here, where they come in and it revolutionizes their way of thinking, or was that something that you felt was unique to your situation and the people you were working with at the time?
AC: No, I don't think it's unique at all. I would love to be able to give you some examples. I don't think that I've ever talked to my colleagues in that framework. I've asked them about ideas, but never about how did Dumbarton Oaks stand on that path. I think that different people have felt differently comfortable at Dumbarton Oaks. I think that I have – I feel as though I've probably felt less the pressure of other people, because I'm a bit of a lone ranger. I come in here, I don't really see who's there; I do see wonderful books. This said, it was wonderful to have colleagues as a Junior Fellow. When I came back in 1980 for another fellowship, again, two friendships that have been absolutely fundamental to my life, Alice-Mary Talbot, John Louden from the summer paleography seminar, Rob Nelson, intensely valued colleagues – have come out of friendships nurtured while I was here.
JWC: Can you tell us anything about what you took back from your second fellowship that you didn't get out of your first, either through just spending more time here or through having a little more perspective?
AC: The second one was a period of crystallization, and out of that fellowship came a spate of articles and a couple of the articles which I still prize very much; and also the basis for the publication for the dissertation came out of it. I think it was in that fellowship – in 1974, there had been a paleography workshop when Linos was here. He was enormously helpful to me. I think it was 1980 that Robert Browning was here, again, working on paleography; and, once again, the opportunity to work with a very, very skilled paleographer was wonderful for me. But I think that the 1980 one really crystallized the opportunity to take ideas which had been germinating and set them into place.
JWC: What was the main product – you said that it was your dissertation that came out of –
AC: Out of the Junior Fellowship.
JWC: That was your Junior Fellowship. What about in '80? What were some of the articles that you were working on at the time?
AC: At that time I was working on an article for the Art Bulletin, a manuscript by the great late Byzantine paleographer Ioasaph – it's at the University of Michigan – and the article on the manuscripts of Ioasaph and the illuminations that came with them. I wrote an article, which ultimately came out in Gesta on frontispieces in gospel books that continues to be a subject of great interest to me. And I wrote an article on the daughter of a late great Byzantine scribe, Theodore Hagiopetrites, who was herself a paleographer. And I think, since then, Rob Nelson has argued that she was not working, as I thought, in Constantinople, but in Thessaloniki where her father did. But it was the beginning of an interest which I also carried on for quite a while: the role of women in the production of Byzantine art. And that was the interest where I crossed paths with Alice-Mary Talbot.
JWC: And how would you characterize paleography at Dumbarton Oaks as a whole, as compared to some of the other sub-fields within the study of Byzantium? Are there a lot of people here who focus on that, or –?
AC: No, it's been very sporadic. I think that paleography sort of flickered in during the period of the sort of establishment of codicology as a manuscript technique. I think since then, since about 1980, the interest in the summer institutes, if it's language-oriented, has been simply with reading Greek, and they've been text seminars more than they've been paleography studies.
JWC: So, you've said that your main goal was to understand the East. What made you choose the study of these books as sort of the key to understanding the East?
AC: I think that what made me choose those books was that my professor, Ilene Forsyth, agreed to take on a Byzantine dissertation if I could get a card-carrying Byzantinist to ride herd on it, and Hugo Buchthal agreed to do this, even though I was not his student in any way. He was working on manuscripts and suggested that, well, here was an issue in manuscript studies which was craving attention, and because it was there I took it, and it – I think neither of us, neither he nor I, when I took it on, had any sense where it was going to lead, and it continues to be a very enigmatic group of books, but it did lead me very deeply first of all into Byzantine book culture, which is a wonderful way – something Byzantines themselves took very seriously, but it also took me into the peripheral areas of Byzantium, which have been of interest to me ever since.
JWC: Have you found your study ever intersecting with other areas of Byzantine history, or have you ever at times thoughts that it would be, you know, nice to sort of do some research into something else, or have you just stuck with the –?
AC: Well, I've been very much an art historian. I've tried to be, as much as I could, a social art historian, placing art into its historical and, to the extent that I can, literary context. But, no, I've been very much an art historian.
JWC: What can you tell us about the museum here and some of the artifacts that they have relative to your studies?
AC: Well, actually, relative to my studies, I think that the manuscripts, although there are not many of them, have been a constant thread. Since about 1990, I've turned more toward wall painting and icons. And although I've been always appreciative of just the visual delight of having some very fine icons, particularly the mosaic icons, there to look at, my particular interests have sort of gone in other directions.
JWC: What can you tell us about the actual physical collection of the manuscripts you were just talking about? How many of them are there? Do you know if they're used very often? Has there been much scholarship which has emerged from the materials that we hold here?
AC: Well, until recently there were four, and now there are five. And the Dumbarton Oaks 3, the New Testament and Psalter, is a manuscript, which has been infinitely used and delighted in. The others have not been as much studied, but I think that recently Gudrun has brought them out several times – and it's been wonderful – and beautifully displayed them, also with the computer images beside them, which has made them much more eloquent.
JWC: So, this is something that I'm curious about, the way that they're displayed. Now, I don't know if you've seen the actual exhibit, where they're out in what used to be the courtyard. They've been made very accessible for visitors who come in, and maybe especially for children. They even have a little part of the exhibit where people can take an actual piece of parchment and touch it and feel what it actually is. As somebody who came here for the first time as a young student in junior high and didn't fully understand or appreciate what you were looking at the time, how do you think the exhibits that are in Dumbarton Oaks may impact the future generation of Byzantinists? Is there a duty that Dumbarton Oaks has through its public outreach to build the discipline?
AC: Yeah. It has obligations in a number of directions, and I think that the direction which has been most exciting is making not only the museum, the exhibited objects, but the full body of its objects available to professors who wanted to bring their students to examine them, to talk with the curators, and to get the sense of really what it is to be in the presence, even tactile presence, of objects. And I think Dumbarton Oaks has been very exciting on this score, also for the various Fellows. They have wonderful sessions in the museum. I think that the museum publications have been fabulous for teaching. Gary Vikan's Byzantine Pilgrimage Art remains one of my favorite teaching tools altogether. Byzantine Security is also just a wonderful introduction to the eloquence of everyday objects. So, I think that that's been done marvelously. I think it's just much more recently that I've sensed an invitation to younger people, and with the manuscripts, I think that manuscripts are really a kind of object that is resistant to the whole museum scenario because they're like movies. They're an art of time, and you can't make them move in a museum. You can't go and turn the pages. One page is only – it doesn't really give you the excitement of manuscripts. On the other hand, the interactive medium, which are absolutely fabulous for students is also opening up manuscripts in an exciting way.
JW: Speaking of outreach, in 1987 I believe, you were a Dumbarton Oaks visiting scholar at Syracuse University giving public lectures and presentations. How would you say that contributes to that outreach? – the obligation, the Dumbarton Oaks obligation to outreach?
AC: I did the Dumbarton Oaks visiting lecture series, and I was also a Phi Beta Kappa visiting lecturer. I would love to see something like the Dumbarton Oaks lectures happen again because – the impact is very – it can have tremendous "spot impact." That can also be seen as very small impact, because it can make a tremendous impact on only a few people. In my case, I think I was at a – I tend to get mixed up with the Phi Beta Kappa lectures, but I think I went to several schools. In each school, there would be for instance one person who really caught on [snaps her fingers]. Later on, I've had a couple of people say, "Oh yes, I've heard you," which makes me think, yes, its something which can work. I think that it probably is a very expensive form of cultivation. The Dumbarton Oaks junior positions which they've cultivated in universities may have had a more durable impact on what I think has been one of the great challenges, which has been getting a place, getting positions within academia.
JWC: I'm not sure what the exact year was, but I know there was a similar program or maybe even the same program where individuals – I can think of two offhand, Ioli Kalavrezou and Herb Kessler. It was a similar public lecture series. When they discussed it, they may have been going at times to address the public, not even a university audience. Is this the same thing that you were doing?
AC: I don't know. I'm not sure, but I was not aware that the Dumbarton Oaks lectures were done very often. I'm not sure what the relationship was.
JWC: Can you tell us about some of the individuals you interacted with here from the administration – directors of the institution, directors of study? How do you feel that things – directors – have changed over time, the direction of Dumbarton Oaks and the focus on different areas of Byzantium has changed?
AC: One of the big changes that I've been very aware of was the withdrawal from archeological engagement. The center of my research in the end became the island of Cyprus, where the Dumbarton Oaks Conservation Consolidation of the Byzantine churches marked a tremendous threshold in our knowledge of Byzantine art, has made an enormous difference to the island of Cyprus itself, and has a considerable afterlife in my own life because I just finished up the publication of Asinou, which was one of the churches which Dumbarton Oaks had consolidated back then. I felt that as archeology ebbed at Dumbarton Oaks, engagement with the visual also tended to shift more and more toward the verbal. I think that Henry Maguire was extremely deft at weaving the visual into the projects of Dumbarton Oaks, sort of keeping it there. I think that Margret Mullett has been very conscientious to see to it that there is a visual dimension to things. I think that in some ways, the visual engagement of Dumbarton Oaks has ebbed, at least in the Byzantine world. On the other hand, I think the commitment that someone like Alice-Mary Talbot has maintained to making Byzantine texts available through study, through study projects, and through translation has made an enormous impact on what we have available to teach with. If we want to make Byzantine studies part of the Byzantine world, we need to have texts to teach with. She's made a tremendous difference in that respect. I think that – I can remember being very much exercised in Giles Constable's period when he suggested that it was fatal for Byzantine Studies to try to sever themselves from the West. I happen to work on the Crusades. One would have thought – I think fundamentally he is right, but I think he was premature. I think we needed to establish ourselves as worthy of independent academic lines, and once we had those, than absolutely knit the world back together again. I think Giles nowadays would have been perfect. I think Dumbarton Oaks has been, has brought people from Islamic studies, from Syriac studies, I'm from Western studies, all into the program.
JWC: There were two things from that I wanted to discuss. One, you mentioned the visual studies. As an art historian you've really dedicated your life to that. What do you think Byzantine Studies is missing if they forget the commitment to the visual, when people delve too deeply into the text and don't study the originals?
AC: The Byzantine culture was one which put tremendous emphasis upon visual presentation. Things needed to be to reflect the grandeur, the impressiveness of their church, particularly, and of their state. This dimension, to me at least, is absolutely fundamental to understanding where they put money. I just ran across what I think is a wonderful word. It's "iconomics." The iconomics of Byzantium needs to be taken into account [laughs.]
JWC: The other thing was when you were mentioning an evolution in what was being studied here, and bringing in people who studied the Islamic world and Western world. How do you believe that relates to the original mission that Dumbarton Oaks was charged with by the Blisses? As the academic world changed, we've changed along with them. How do you remain centered on the mission at Dumbarton Oaks?
AC: I've not seen this in any serious way in contradiction, so long as one remembers where the center of the world is, which happens to be Constantinople. I think Herbert Muller is absolutely right when he said Byzantium is the empire of the new middle. In this sense, the Islamic world, the Western world, the Slavic world are absolutely a part of the way in which Byzantium is in the world. One has to understand these things too. I would be distressed if I learned the center of the world was slipping into one or another of those.
JWC: What about some of the other areas of study here that are unrelated to the Byzantine: the Garden and Landscape or the pre-Columbian? In your time here, have you had the chance to interact in any –
AC: For me, that was the big threshold of my 1990 fellowship. That was a great fellowship of friendships. Nancy Ševčenko was here, Engelina Smirnova was here, Chrysanthe Baltoyianni was here. But Nancy and I decided that we were going to get to know the other communities. She particularly became engaged with the landscape community. I became absolutely captivated by the pre-Columbian. What this brought for me was this was the period in which I discovered anthropology. It was the pre-Columbianists who introduced me to this. The discovery of the pre-Columbianists was tremendously valuable for me. It led me to my determination to get a pre-Columbian line in my own university. Adam Herring, who is also a Dumbarton Oaks person, came to fill that position. The ability to look at visual things in anthropological rather than with a strictly art historical point of view has been critical. I found that really exciting and I am delighted that the communities are much more together now.
JWC: A lot of time it seems that in the different fields, scholars are studying similar topics in parallel - the history of the art and architecture in the Byzantine world and the art and architecture in the pre-Columbian world, for example. Do you think that there is opportunity for the knowledge that has been cultivated in one field to substantively impact the other? Or is there a reason why they've never been studied together?
AC: I think that in a sense, by and large they are going to be studied as specialties in their own paths, and yet pre-Columbianists and Byzantinists are living in the same twenty-first century and we're going to have common curiosities about the body, about ecology, about the visual, and these should produce points in which in the end, conclusions are convergent or divergent. But it has been very exciting to look at them together.
JWC: That's very interesting. Can you tell me anything about the social life at Dumbarton Oaks? You said in the 1990s you started to interact a bit more with the other areas of study. Is the academic life at Dumbarton Oaks aided in any way by the social activities that occur outside of the 9 to 5?
AC: I must confess I participated in them rather little. I am a bit of a lone ranger. This said, I mentioned as we went along friendships which have germinated here, which for me have been pure gold – just really wonderful friendships.
JWC: What about any of the different aspects of the estate? Have you been able to take advantage of the garden or the pool?
AC: For me, the garden has been – I adored the garden. I recently had a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, which has hundreds of acres, and living in space I find wonderful. The space is smaller here, but having the garden I found really wonderful. I really loved it. And I enjoy having the art installations in the garden too.
JWC: They didn't have those when you were first here, right?
AC: That's right.
JWC: Has your experience in the garden changed at all over the periods you've been here?
AC: No, it's remained one of wonder. I love, on Mondays for instance, often the back gate is open and one can just wander in. Every now and again I've gotten locked in [laughs.] I can remember one spring lamenting the passing of the cherry blossoms. Giles Constable found me wandering among the drifting petals and I said, "Oh Giles, it's so terrible to watch them go," and he said, "Annemarie, it's just the beginning. Spring in Washington goes on forever." I find the gardens wonderful to participate in.
JWC: Do you have any other stories like that? Things that you can remember being particularly wonderful about your time here?
AC: I remember one morning coming scuttling in the front door in my usual mouse-along-the-floorboards way. As I left the door to come into the corridor, there was Angeliki Laiou in all her magnificence. I was so startled, I just turned to her with all with the excitement I had coming in with this big smile and she looked at me and said, "Well, you look happy." And I looked back and said, "Oh yes, I am. I always find something new." She looked at me and said, "That makes me very happy." It was a very warm moment. I feel very much that way about Dumbarton Oaks. I always find something new, and no matter how seriously it takes itself, I find that it brings a certain amount of excitement – positive energy and excitement, and it welcomes you with that.
JWC: Have you found excitement like that at other places, or is there something at Dumbarton Oaks with that spark
AC: I confess I found the Institute for Advanced Studies a very wonderful experience. My feeling is particularly strong for Dumbarton Oaks because ever since 1955, I've kept coming back. I'm like old pennies. It's very hard to exterminate me. I keep turning up again.
JWC: You didn't happen to meet the Blisses or anyone the first time you came, did you?
AC: No, I didn't. My parents, I think, had met the Blisses because they lived in Washington. I only heard about the teas.
JWC: What did you hear?
AC: Well, how important propriety of behavior was.
JWC: Are there any things that you think are important to talk about that haven't been touched on at this point?
AC: Gosh, we've talked on a great many things. I think that the big question which lies ahead of us all is where it's going – where it's going in the future. I think that I have great admiration for Margret Mullett for the openness which I think she's brought in terms of feeling easy among people and being somewhat more relaxed here. I think that here I fail Dumbarton Oaks. I have an enormous hope that the vitality of the institution continues to grow. And then comes the question, what are your recommendations? My only recommendation can be that you can't look to the past. You have to move with the direction in which the ideas are moving. For that, I think I'm still trying to finish up what I did. One has to trust younger people to take over.
JWC: Do you have a prognosis for Dumbarton Oaks? Have you seen the vitality growing, has it come in ebbs and flows?
AC: What I sense is a greater warmth toward it. I feel there have been ebbs and flows in the sense that Dumbarton Oaks stands in the way of younger ambition and at times where it felt it was more open to younger ambitions. I sense more warmth, and that makes me very hopeful.
JWC: You have a great wealth of knowledge, both about the field and the institution. For someone in the future, what would you tell them about Dumbarton Oaks, and what should they keep in mind to ensure this resource is here for posterity?
AC: To someone who is interested or –?
JWC: To someone who is interested in Byzantine studies as a whole, and in particular here at Dumbarton Oaks.
AC: My sense is that it's a wonderful place to be able to take seriously what you're interested in. My advice would be to concentrate on that. I pay rather little attention to social dimensions – the way in which one lives, whether one can have pets, whether one can have children, things like that. I have found it a wonderful place to go and really take seriously and take the opportunity to really sink into what is a serious interest to you. You are liable to find other people who are similarly interested.
JW: Thank you so much.
JWC: Thank you for being here today.
AC: Well, thank you.]]>
HK: No, I first came as an employee, assistant to Paul Underwood working on the Kariye Djami project, in the fateful summer of 1963.
JW: How did you first come to be involved with Dumbarton Oaks?
HK: Kurt Weitzmann, my professor at Princeton, also knew Paul Underwood and arranged for summer employment with Paul.
JW: Mr. Weitzmann says in a letter in your file that, when you applied for a Junior Fellowship with Dumbarton Oaks, you were not a Byzantinist "in the strict sense" of the word, but that you worked on the Touronian Bible and had gone deeply into Eastern manuscript recensions and Jewish sources. Even though you weren't a Byzantinist "in the strict sense," then, why did you decide that D.O. was going to be the place most conducive to bringing your dissertation to a conclusion?
HK: The library, primarily, which was as rich as any resource I had access to.
JW: Other than the richness of the library, what were your initial impressions of Dumbarton Oaks?
HK: Well, the year I was a Junior Fellow, the symposium on "Byzantium and the West" took place. In those years, the speakers were invited to spend the year at D.O. So, present at D.O. in addition to Ernst Kitzinger were Otto Demus, Jean Porcher, Hugo Buchthal, and others, with whom I became friendly and also to whom I owe a lot of mentoring.
JW: How would you characterize your relationship with Mr. Weitzmann?
HK: Well, he and I were extremely close. I ended up being the executor of his will, and he and I collaborated on two major books, both supported by Dumbarton Oaks. The second one is a monograph on the painting in the Dura-Europos synagogue, which D.O. published, and the first one became in those days called a project, a D.O. project, which sent us to England, to study that Cotton Genesis book. I was a Project Fellow working on that and supported for three years on that project. So, he and I collaborated after I finished my Ph.D. under his direction.
JW: How is working on a collaboration a unique process from working on something on your own?
HK: Oh, very complicated and difficult. The first project, the Cotton Genesis project, was basically finishing work that Weitzman had begun in the '40s and felt too old to complete. When he asked me to come onboard, I ended up writing every word of the published text, but using material that he gave me and working with him day after day on the analysis I provided. The second book, the Dura-Europos book, was actually in a way a criticism of Weitzmann. He gave me his text; I said, "You really can't publish this without supplementing your argument in a different way." He said, "Then you do it." So, I wrote about half the book, which was to complete or to fill in what I considered the lacunae in his study. But it was always congenial.
JW: In what ways did you make use of Dumbarton Oaks's resources in collaborating on those two projects?
HK: At the time of the first project, D.O. was also deeply involved with Otto Demus's publication on the mosaics of San Marco, which D.O. had photographed in a photo campaign. The photos were essential – still unpublished – essential to my work. So, I had special access to as-yet not available materials; that was important. The Index of Christian Art served me well; the library of course. Yep, those were the basic resources. The second project was fundamentally just a publication, and D.O.'s part was just publishing the book.
JW: As a Junior Fellow, Herb, did you ever have the opportunity to meet Mrs. Bliss?
HK: I did. I met her several times during my time as Junior Fellow. Mrs. Bliss would appear regularly at the Fellows' Tea in the Founders' Room, and also at the Spring Symposium, where all the Fellows were invited to dine with her. She would also occasionally come to the concerts. So, yes, I met her.
JW: Do you have any specific recollections of your interactions with her, during tea or after a symposium, say?
HK: Well, she was very enthusiastic about Byzantine art. She was at that moment very keen on a project on Mt. Sinai. She was very, let's say, aristocratic, in her reactions to the regular professors such as Kitzinger, and also then to the Junior Fellows. We were somehow – we were led to understand that we were in her service.
JW: Could you characterize Ernst Kitzinger's Directorship?
HK: Hmm. Yes, he was very involved in his own work at the time, of course, and interacted with the Fellows regularly, but from a distance, I'd say. So, he read my dissertation and called me into the office to discuss it. That was the most important interaction I had with him, I'd say.
JW: What did you discuss with him? What changes did you make to your dissertation as a result of that discussion?
HK: It was curious, in that he had taken voluminous notes – and these were the days when photocopy machines were new, and making photocopies rather expensive – and when I asked him for the notes afterwards to make a copy, he refused to give them to me, so I was not happy about that; but I remembered enough to incorporate – I understood that his criticisms, and they were criticisms, had to be taken into account before I published. So, they were useful. But I never fully understood why he didn't want to deliver the notes to me, even to make photocopies.
JW: It seems that collaboration with your superiors was a very important part of your experience at Dumbarton Oaks in refining the work that you were doing. As a Junior Fellow, did you have any like interactions with your peers?
HK: Umm – I'm trying to remember who my peers were. We were a socially very integrated group, but there were no other art historians, if I remember right, and no one working on material related to my project, so I think that was less useful, that is, my peers. But that was, I'd say, more an accident of who happened to be there at the time. As I said, the counter to that was that I was fortunate to be present when a symposium really up my alley was being organized, so the Senior Fellows, or whatever they were called, really helped me and became close friends in subsequent years, especially Demus and Buchthal.
JW: What was the symposium about which you found to be really up your alley?
HK: It was called "Byzantium and the West." Also, the presence of Jean Porcher, who was the retired Director of the Biblioteque – the Keeper of Manuscripts or something at the Bibliothèque Nationale – resulted in my having unrestricted access later to the holdings at the BN.
JWC: Would you mind just speaking a little bit louder? We can hear you fine, but just for the transcription it may be a little helpful.
HK: Okay.
JWC: Thank you.
JW: What was your role with "Byzantium and the West"? Or were you in the audience for that symposium?
HK: I was just in the audience for that symposium, but, as I said, the senior participants spent the year at D.O. It wasn't as, developed later, just a coming for the three-day weekend. So, I watched them work, I watched them collaborate, and had lots of time to talk to them during the course of the year.
JWC: Now, in an interview that was done with Oleg Grabar, he spoke at length about the type of symposium that you just talked about, where people would come and they would spend a long time working with each other, and the final product would be, you know, work that spanned a year or, you know, whatever the length was. And he mentioned that, as the symposia became more focused on giving individual papers and only spending a weekend here or a week here, there was a change in the feel of the symposia and what he thought was a less robust symposium experience. What are your thoughts on that?
HK: Well, I can go back to the moment of change, because I was a Senior Fellow at the time, and there was a perception – that is, on the Senior Fellows Committee, so I was privy to the discussions, I participated in them – and there was a feeling under Giles Constable that Dumbarton Oaks was too undemocratic, that having the old kind of symposium meant inviting people for a year, filling most of the slots with people that were selected by the Senior Fellows for a specific purpose, and that that should be changed. The result – I agree completely with what Oleg said – the result was a transformation not only of the end-product, which was always published as an issue of Dumbarton Oaks Papers – so it really was a complete package: think of a topic, invite the right people, get them to come, get them to collaborate, have a polished symposium in which there were no surprises, and publish at least the very – all of the good papers. Sometimes people were disinvited, I understand. But the result was a finished work, and that was spectacular. For the Junior Fellows at the time, what really impressed me was watching senior scholars working together, collaborating, and I witnessed nothing like that ever again in my career.
JW: Earlier you mentioned that the Junior Fellows were very much socially integrated. How did that come about?
HK: Well, in my year as a Junior Fellow, it was because the participants in the symposium came as bachelors, so we all went out to dinners a lot together, ate together. The swimming pool had its effect, creating an informal atmosphere for those who went down there. And, again, I was lucky that the topic my year was an art-historical topic, so it brought art historians. I'm not sure – I don't know one way or the other whether non-art historians had the same kind of experience.
JW: So, after your Junior Fellowship, Herb, you'd go on to have something of a lifelong relationship with Dumbarton Oaks, where you're an employee, a Project Fellow, a Senior Fellow. At a given stage in your relationship with D.O., how did your experience differ from that of the previous stage or stages?
HK: Well, Dumbarton Oaks itself had changed. When I was a Project Fellow, Giles Constable was trying to find ways to open D.O. up. He was much criticized as a non-Byzantinist, and he probably turned to me – well, first as a Project Fellow, he encouraged a project that cut East and West, so that was certainly part of his agenda. And then when he initiated my appointment as Senior Fellow, it was, I think again, to bridge gaps. I had been a member of the Byzantine Studies Conference, which, when Giles Constable was first appointed to D.O., was hostile – was somewhat hostile – and I think Giles was surprised to learn, when I was Project Fellow, that I was not hostile to his Directorship. And so he brought me on board. I was quite young at the time. So, Dumbarton Oaks was changing in many, many ways. I mean, he was, as Director, very much determined to open D.O. up, to break the stranglehold that a very small inner circle had had on the institution.
JW: Do you remember any initiatives in particular that Constable proposed to the end of opening D.O. up?
HK: Oh, sure. He began by democratizing the eating. So, when I was a Junior Fellow, only the faculty, which was almost exclusively male, were allowed to eat – and the Fellows, also mostly all men – in the Fellows' building. Giles sensed this and invited everyone to eat, but everyone had to pay; and this meant that members of the staff, like Susan Boyd, who never felt welcome to eat in the Fellows building before that, even though her assistants could eat there sometimes, felt free, integrated into the operation. That was one thing that Giles did. As I mentioned, again, he insisted that all fellowships be awarded on an application basis. I know that some scholars bridled at that. For example, Hugo Buchthal felt that there was no need for D.O. to get letters of recommendation about him, because his record was already well-known and his history with D.O. was established; and Giles in fact compromised in the end on such cases of truly renowned Fellows. But it was a move to open up a very closed institution. He also put a halt to ongoing projects by scholars who went, for example, every summer to, say, Istanbul year after year after year on D.O.'s nickel without having to account for it. Yes, in every way he breathed fresh air into the institution.
JWC: When a lot of people talk about Giles, they always use the word "democratization" and, oddly enough, the first thing that always seems to come up is, as you mention, the lunch. Why do you think that the institutions that were here before he came in had such a large effect on the minds of scholars – things like that versus the scholarship itself and policies relating to scholarship?
HK: Well, Giles came in at a low point in the history of D.O., a low point that was really the result of inbreeding, I would say. So, small groups seemed – well, certainly evinced control of large amounts of money. Harvard was not happy with the direction. Harvard – Derek Bok was trying ways to make Dumbarton Oaks flourish, but to become relevant to the American educational system. Independent, stand-alone research institutions like D.O. were rare in those days. They're a little more common now. And, of all things, a rather upper class Englishman was brought in to effect the transformation; and he did. He was of course – is, of course, a very distinguished scholar, so no one could impugn his credentials, though he wasn't a Byzantinist and was attacked, quite viciously, by people who stood to lose ground because of that. But he had a vision, and he had skills for implementing it. I think he saved D.O. this way. He also came in at a – it looked like D.O. was squandering its funds, and there was the famous Proctor Report – I suppose you've heard about that, that suggested that income would fall below expenditures very – I forget how many years, but like eight years; and Giles set about to change that. I can give you one example. D.O. had funded Otto Demus's San Marco project and the related Adriatic mosaics project with stipends to provide scholars and photographers, year after year, to study these very important mosaics, Byzantine-related mosaics. When Giles came in, Otto was finishing the project and to publish San Marco, which he had worked on for many, many years at D.O.'s expense. The Publications Department – Julia Warner – sent out the book for an estimate of cost, and it came in at something like a quarter of a million dollars, which in the early '80s was absolutely staggering; and Giles said, "We can't do it." Otto was crushed by this news. He couldn't believe it because he, like everyone else, had been accustomed to tapping D.O.'s largesse. I myself came to the rescue there by – I was close to people at the University of Chicago Press; I arranged for them to make a bid – I think it was about half the cost that had been given. There was a lot of tut-tutting, that it wouldn't be up to D.O. standards. I think everyone thinks it ended up being a spectacular publication, matching D.O.'s criteria, exceeding them perhaps, for half the price. But this gives you – my anecdote gives you some sense of what D.O. was like: no bids to spending the money, no thinking about costs. Related to that was the whole editorial process. They checked – Julia Warner and her crew who – they were wonderful – but they actually checked every footnote in D.O.P. against the holdings in the library to make sure there were no errors, so there was a staff doing that, and they used the most expensive printing operation without ever thinking about savings. And, of course, you've probably heard that one of Giles's radical innovations was to cut out the dust jacket and use shrink-wrap instead of dust jackets, which saved a lot of money, and to begin distributing D.O.P. through the Harvard University Press.
JWC: Why do you think that there was that attitude toward money? Do you think that maybe it was because of the way the Blisses lived, and things are still being run as a wealthy private estate? Or was it more a culture that had developed – you used the word "inbreeding," where people had a sense of entitlement. What do you think, you know, created the culture that you just spoke of?
HK: Absolutely entitlement. I know that Weitzmann felt – he was a Senior Fellow – he felt, and expressed to his students, that he had one Junior Fellowship per year in his gift at D.O. He could name one of his students Junior Fellow. There was a little jockeying, I know, once. He tells the story of how he played Richard Krautheimer into voting for his candidate, so there was a little of that. But there's no question that he conveyed to me that, if I wanted to go to D.O., he more or less could arrange that. So, it was absolutely a small circle. This is not really criticism; a lot was done in those days of this order, and the small circle named the outer circle.
JW: Would you discuss how Giles's democratization of Dumbarton Oaks affected the quality of the scholarship coming out of the institute?
HK: Well, it brought in the scholarship first of all. So, his point of view was that it need not be only Byzantium but could focus on Byzantium and its neighbors, and, if you look at some of the topics that were studied during his reign, they included Byzantium and the East, for example, as well as the West, or Armenia and the like. So, he went in that direction. Also, he included many new kinds of topics: so, Byzantium and medicine. I think the scholarship – I would argue, the level of scholarship rose – it did not decline. But I think that depends on the viewpoint of the person you talk to. I mean, the opinion will vary considerably, because it was a rather hot time for Giles and the rest of us as he effected this transition from the old guard to no guard. He really did democratize the processes.
JW: At what point did this "hot time" cool down, and what were the causes of that cool down?
HK: Well, Giles was succeeded by Robert Thomson, who in a way returned somewhat to the old traditions. I remember I was a Senior Fellow at the time and Robert said, with a little smile on his face, "I've been asked what my vision of D.O. is," meaning he was following Giles, so Giles had a vision, and he said, sarcastically, "my vision is that D.O. is a library." So, he brought the expansive projects in tighter, if he didn't disband them and returned to a much more sedate time at D.O. And then I sort of passed from the picture after that in the mid-1980s, except for coming back for symposia and the like.
JW: When you became a Senior Fellow, did your perspective of the Junior Fellowships change at all? Did you see it from a different perspective?
HK: Oh, sure. Again, there were controversies. In the old days, in my day as Junior Fellow, a Junior Fellow could expect automatic renewal. So, Kitzinger was quite surprised when I opted not to have second year at D.O. as a Junior Fellow, but to start teaching, whereas Giles favored – I'm not remembering exactly – but he certainly favored one year fellowships and not automatic renewal. So, that was certainly one difference. Ask me the question again. I forgot what you wanted to know.
JW: We were interested in how your perspective of the Junior Fellowship changed once you were in a senior position.
HK: Yeah. Well, we were very worried about standards – standards of applications. We had some bad experiences and so we kept fiddling with the criteria. Especially in those days, a lot of scholars, probably still true, young scholars would apply for D.O. as a place to park themselves while they were waiting to get jobs or trying to get one of the scarce jobs, so we certainly looked askance at young Ph.D.s who were trying to come to D.O. as a postdoc. We were worried that the postdocs, I guess Fellows, they were called "Fellows" without any modification, that they would simply be scholars who used it as a default. We didn't reject that out of hand, we again – Giles, a very Solomonic man said, "Everyone with a Ph.D. should be free to apply for a fellowship, but we would hold them to the criteria we applied to more advanced scholars." So, some people did succeed but others did not on the basis of that.
JW: Do you remember any specific changes to the selection criteria?
HK: It kept varying. What comes to my mind – yes, of course. There's one critical one. While I was Senior Fellow, we sacrificed one slot to pay for bringing the candidates in for interviews. This was a direct reaction to a series of problematic cohorts of Junior Fellows. So, we laid eyes on them. We were very concerned that one of them who had applied, of course, in the fall for a fellowship, ended up having a deferred degree at Oxford and that was egg on our face. We decided that if we could actually talk to people, press them, we would make better decisions. I think the judgment was we did. It was worth the price. But we kept evaluating the costs of bringing people in for interviews against the benefits.
JWC: Who do you, in your personal opinion, feel makes the best type of a Junior Fellow? Someone who's been around the block a little longer or someone who's sort of green and can use this chance to grow and see what their scholarly interests are?
HK: I would say maybe both types – D.O. would benefit from having both types and vice versa. It did create programs, maybe under Giles, I don't remember, for training people in Byzantine Greek and other disciplines at an early stage to nurture a cohort of American, I guess, mostly American scholars, who weren't getting this kind of training in their host institutions, but D.O.'s commitment to helping students finish dissertations is also extremely important. I don't know if you are going to ask me about this, but I'll tack this onto that question. Of course, the other thing Giles did was create joint appointments with neighboring institutions. Are you going to ask me about that or should I just talk?
JW: No, please. Go ahead.
HK: Okay. A part of Giles's mission to integrate D.O. with the American educational system was to create joint appointments in Byzantine subjects with local institutions – Georgetown, University of Maryland, Johns Hopkins, American University, various places. I happened to be a Senior Fellow and helped negotiate the joint appointment with my home institution at Johns Hopkins. This reflects on Giles's whole attitude. The pressure on the Senior Fellows and Director came from certain empowered old guard members of D.O. Giles said, "No, we're going to have an open search." The open search for Johns Hopkins resulted in the appointment of someone no one had ever heard of before, a man who was trained in Belgium, an American man called Michael McCormick, trained in Belgium. We all agreed he looked like the very best candidate, even better than Harvard's own Ph.Ds. This rankled, I can assure you. We brought Mike in for the interview and he impressed both sides – Hopkins and D.O. – and he was appointed. It rankled further because Mike was accused of not being a true Byzantinist, even though he has super Greek as well as super Latin. Anyway, the seed was planted at D.O. Mike eventually got tenure at Johns Hopkins and then he was stolen from Johns Hopkins by Harvard where he's now a named chair, got the Mellon lifetime achievement award of a million and a half bucks, and many other things. So, Giles's decision in that case was certainly proven to be a wise one. So, its just characteristic of Giles's openness, but also his vision to plant Byzantine Studies in America. And there are many, many other success stories. John Duffy went from Maryland to Harvard, and I'm sure you know better than I that part of the history.
JWC: I think it was also under Giles that there was a project where Dumbarton Oaks scholars and fellows would travel around to different cities in the U.S. and they would do a series of lectures on a topic of their interest, but the lectures weren't always given in academic settings. I think the idea was to share Byzantine Studies with a larger audience. Are you familiar with that? Did you ever have a role?
HK: I did it. I did it myself. I haven't thought of this in a long time. I went to Mt. Holyoke College and I gave a lecture that was open to the public.
JW: What was the lecture on?
HK: I can't remember. It was a long time ago.
JW: Do you remember at all how it was received by the general public?
HK: I liked it. I think it was received – you know, I don't know my particular lecture – but I think the event was very successful. I remember vaguely, now that you mention it, talking to students about Byzantium – students who had never heard the word before.
JW: Do you think D.O. has an academic duty or that it's in the best interests of Dumbarton Oaks to launch public outreach initiatives like that?
HK: Yes. Byzantine Studies, and with it Dumbarton Oaks, will die if the job is left just to a few scholars at a few universities. There is little doubt that when Giles started his initiatives, there were very, very few places, and increasingly fewer, that were willing to invest in Byzantine Studies. Giles also had the initiative of creating a troika of scholars at Harvard, this was controversial too – at least one university where there would be a critical mass of Byzantinists. Someone doing Byz. Lit., someone doing Byz. art history, and someone doing Byz. history to help train students.
JW: During and beyond your Senior Fellowship, which extended between 1980–86, if we're not mistaken, you served as the advisor to the Byzantine photograph collection. What were some of the important changes made with regard to that collection in that period?
HK: We hired a professional archivist, and then a second one. She retired. When I came on the scene, it was a rather private precinct used by in-house scholars. There were very unpleasant controls on some of the material – unpleasant in the sense that some scholars from the outside were allowed to use the materials and some were denied it on the basis of personal preference. So, we instituted a policy of openness, hired a professional archivist to put the materials together, and in general apply professional standards. Many of the very precious fieldwork materials were degrading because they were not being stored in archivally sound fashions – photo sleeves and the like. Indeed, one of the things we did was visit every office in Dumbarton Oaks and look under desks to retrieve boxes of photographic and other materials that scholars had just left randomly throughout the building. So, we put in an order and opened it up. A good case in point that concerns the San Marco material, which Dumbarton Oaks had almost exclusive rights to at the time: whereas Weitzman and I, as I mentioned, were allowed to have access to this material, and indeed to publish it, another eminent scholar was denied the same right because she, quote, "was not good enough as a scholar," end quote. The result was, she went to the newly founded Getty Institute in California, had them re-photograph the material she wanted, and ended up having another, even better set, actually the Norman mosaics of Sicily, which she then published. So, we put it on an open and professional foundation.
JW: We spoke recently with Dumbarton Oaks archivist and researcher Natalia Teteriatnikov. She mentioned that you recommended the Princeton Index be incorporated into the D.O. collections. Could you discuss the basis for that recommendation?
HK: That has to be a misunderstanding. D.O. always had a copy of the Index of Christian Art. She might – and they existed side by side – Princeton would never have allowed the integration of D.O.'s collection – the integration of the two. I guess what she must mean is that I thought D.O.'s materials might be entered into the Index of Christian Art, which at the time was rather weak in Byzantine. That must be what she meant. That was stopped on the grounds that the Princeton Index only includes, or in those days only included, published materials. So, there would be no gain in adding the unpublished D.O. material. That must be what she meant.
JW: To move to some more general questions, Herb, what do you think the greatest accomplishments of the Byzantine Studies Program were over your time at Dumbarton Oaks?
HK: I'd say first of all excavation and restoration. Beginning with the Byzantine Institute of America, which was subsumed by the D.O., D.O. went to Istanbul and restored monuments. My earliest work with Paul Underwood was on the Kariye Djami restoration, which is a perfect example of bringing a major work of art, preserving it, restoring it, bringing it to life, publishing it, and opening it up to the public. D.O. did that in many, many places – Sinai, Greece more generally, and eastern Turkey. So, that's historically its greatest accomplishment. You probably know about the episode about the silver treasure which put that in jeopardy. Again, Giles had to navigate through pretty heavy waters to rescue the relationship with the Turks and preserve the excavations, the access D.O. had to the monuments in Turkey.
JW: How did the social life, habitual activities associated with the program at Dumbarton Oaks change over your years here? – symposia, lectures, reports, dinners, teas, that sort of thing.
HK: So, totally – again, under the pressures of budget and democratization. When I was a Junior Fellow, participants by initiation, not by open application to the symposia were treated to extravagant lunches. Everyone remembers Mrs. Bliss's fondness for a poach salmon, an enormous salmon – probably ten pound poached salmon that had scales made of sliced cucumber out there for everyone to enjoy and other such delicacies. She herself had a private lunch for the Fellows and participants at her house on the final day of the symposium – at her house on 28th and P. That was part of it. The teas were served by her upstairs house maid with a French name. I forget what it was. They were pretty modest; they weren't extravagant. But the service was. It went then to – it went quite far at a certain point under Giles that the symposium lunches were boxed lunches that participants had to pay for. My last symposium seems to have struck a better balance between extravagance and the parsimonious middle period. So that was – you asked about food, what else was on your list?
JW: Teas, symposia, lectures…
HK: Yeah, I guess the symposia we already covered. They symposia were more serious, more productive, but vastly more expensive the way they took place in the past. I must say also in this context that the tradition of the old symposia had pretty much run the course. It was very hard to get scholars of a new generation to be able to come for a year. It was – the Senior Fellows looked around for topics. It was very hard to find topics, to manufacture topics that would suit the old format. So, that too should be noted. It wasn't just democratization, but a recognition of a new scholarly world.
JW: Do you have any memories, either positive or negative, that are especially salient about Dumbarton Oaks or that epitomize your time here?
HK: Yeah, when I first arrived in the summer of 1963, windows were thrown open. Everyone had access all the time. That is, I can't remember whether I had a key or just walked through the door. Hot summer nights I remember going in whenever I wanted. It was just a different kind of operation. One of the things sacrificed by all the changes is this sense that one was part of an inner group that had no control. So, people did take books out into the garden, took books over to the Fellows building. We knew the entire staff. There was a mingling between the staff. Of course, there were no black people on the staff at the time. It was still very southern. D.O. changed with that world. Mentioning that, of course – the summer of 1963, my being there as an employee meant that I could and did go to Martin Luther King's March on Washington. That was an index of the circumstances in which D.O. found itself during the first period I was associated with it.
JW: That's very interesting. Mike McCormick said that we needed to ask you about Joan Southcote-Aston – that you'd have some gossip for us.
HK: Oh my God. That wicked, wicked Michael putting that in your head. Well, here's what I was told. Joan rose to a very, very important position at D.O. What I was told was she had in fact come to the States as a housemaid to J. P. Morgan's daughter, who lived in Georgetown, and was found unsatisfactory. So, Ms. Morgan, whatever her name was, called Mildred Bliss and said, "Can you help me out, I don't want to have to send her back." So, Mrs. Bliss hired her. When I first knew Joan, she was a lovely, lovely person – truly kind and elegant. But she was in no way a housemaid. When I first met her, she was Ernst Kitzinger's secretary or research assistant, had a hyphenated name, and a British accent – that was, I guess, yes, when I was a Junior Fellow. When Giles became director, Joan was in some ways running Dumbarton Oaks. That is, she had the living memory – she could and did say, "Well, Mrs. Bliss would not have approved of that. Mrs. Bliss would have not allowed Fellows to come to concerts without ties." That was probably true – so, one listened to her. She was the oracle. She ran the concert series. She was doing various odd jobs. But the irony – and should be maybe on the subject of a novel – is that this person whom, I'm told, started out as a failed Georgetown maid ended up becoming the oracle of the founders of Dumbarton Oaks.
JW: Well Herb, we're coming close to the end of the interview. At this point, I wanted to ask whether there's anything we've neglected to question you about that you'd like to discuss with us.
HK: Yeah. One person you haven't mentioned was Bill Loerke, Giles predecessor as director. Well, he was director of studies. Bill Loerke was brought in in Derek Bok's first attempt to Americanize Dumbarton Oaks. He was the only – one of two people with sufficient administrative ability, sufficient American credentials, and sufficient Byzantine credentials. The other one was Jim Breckenridge at Northwestern University. And Bill was brought in to help transform Dumbarton Oaks. And he was brutally treated by the old guard. Ihor Ševčenko, Cyril Mango, had distain for him because he was not the kind of Byzantinist that they were. And that was certainly true. And he also in a funny way did not manage the transition very well, because he maintained that Dumbarton Oaks's mission was, as he explained to me, he said to Bok, "The green volumes of DOP and D.O. studies and the like." So, he didn't have quite the vision, we call it, that Giles did of outreach beyond the scholarly agenda. But he was brutally treated, scorned and shunned, and I got involved in this in the following way. His first year, he was Director Ihor and Cyril were supposed to run the symposium. To embarrass him, I gather – not absolutely certain of this – they cancelled their symposium. So, that meant that Bill had to face the embarrassment of having his first year without a symposium. And he quickly patched together a symposium of young scholars. I think that was in 1972, where I spoke and Alice-Mary Talbot spoke and Tom Matthews, a lot of young scholars were brought together. Of course, it was not the kind of symposium that would have been had Cyril and Mango [sic] gone ahead or that would have taken place. But Bill is, I think, unappreciated in the history of Dumbarton Oaks, and he was essentially pushed aside when Giles was brought in and spent the rest of his life quite marginalized within Dumbarton Oaks.
JW: Well, thank you so much for your time, Herb. We really appreciate you speaking with us today.
HK: My pleasure. Take care.
JW: You too, bye bye.
HK: Bye bye.]]>
The fall of the crusader-controlled city of Acre to the Muslims in 1291 inspired many schemes for crusades to recover Jerusalem and its environs. One of these proposals is How to Defeat the Saracens, written around 1317 by William of Adam, a Dominican who traveled extensively in the eastern Mediterranean, Persia, and parts of India. The treatise, poorly known even among specialists, presents a five-pronged plan for retaking the Holy Land. In particular, it focuses on cutting off economic and military support for Egypt. William's personal experience in the lands he describes comes through, for example, when he recollects his encounters in Persia with a captive Greek woman whose child he baptized, and in India with a lapsed Christian who said that God had abandoned him.
In this volume Giles Constable provides a critical edition of the Latin text and a facing English translation. Extensive notes, produced in collaboration with other experts, guide the reader through the political, geographical, economic, military, and historical context of this fascinating work.]]>
In Charlemagne's Survey of the Holy Land, Michael McCormick rehabilitates and reinterprets one of the most neglected and extraordinary sources from Charlemagne's revival of the Roman empire: the report of a fact-finding mission to the Christian church of the Holy Land. The roll of documents translated and edited in this volume preserves the most detailed statistical portrait before the Domesday Book of the finances, monuments (including exact dimensions), and female and male personnel of any major Christian church.
Setting these documents in the context of economic trends, archaeological evidence, and a comparison of Holy Land churches and monasteries with their contemporaries west and east, this study shows that the Palestinian church was living in decline as its old financial links with Byzantium slackened. In recounting Charlemagne's move to outflank the Byzantine emperor, McCormick constructs a microhistory of the Frankish king's ambitions and formidable organizational talents for running an empire.
Supplementing McCormick's major synthesis, The Origins of the European Economy, this volume will be indispensable reading for anyone interested in medieval rulership and economics, and in the history of the Holy Land, its Christian communities, and its late antique monuments.]]>