Research Topic
The Graecisation of ᾽Ρομανια: Changing Perceptions in Western Europe of the Eastern Roman Empire from the Early-Sixth to Late-Ninth Centuries
Supervisor
Marek Jankowiak
Focusing primarily on Papal and Frankish manuscript evidence, I am investigating the process by which Byzantium was excised from the Western conception of Romanness and imperium was claimed in the west. Many scholars have seen both the rise of the Papal States and the Carolingian Empire as crucial to the foundation of European civilisation. I seek to take one step back from this and look at how both polities were able to step out of the world of Late Antiquity through a reinterpretation of the ideological frameworks that produced their understanding of the world around them and how this necessarily relied on a paradigm shift in the approach to how Byzantium, that is the Eastern Roman Empire, was understood and interacted with both in internal domestic writings and intellectual thought, and in diplomatic engagements.
