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Page 1 of 2

  • 8 - Byzantium
  • from Part II - Historical Contexts
  • Edited by Catherine Holmes, University of Oxford, Jonathan Shepard, University of Oxford, Jo van Steenbergen, Björn Weiler, Aberystwyth University
  • Book: Political Culture in the Latin West, Byzantium and the Islamic World, c.700–c.1500
  • Published online: 11 August 2021
  • Print publication: 26 August 2021, pp 178-211
  • View extract

    Summary

    This chapter outlines the geographical and chronological contexts of the Byzantine sphere, stressing the role that terrestrial and maritime geography played in the relationship between the imperial centre at Constantinople and the frontiers, as well as in diplomacy. It charts gradual territorial expansion, growth in the economy and flourishing of the church, particularly monasteries, between c.700 and 1050, followed by imperial collapse in the eleventh century, the consolidation of a smaller imperial space in the twelfth and political fragmentation thereafter. It considers the role played by societies and polities beyond the empire in the wider Byzantine sphere, a sphere far from culturally homogeneous. Attention is paid to the principal political formations within the empire itself, emphasising the relationship between formal and informal power. The key co-ordinates of formal Byzantine political society – emperor, palace, eunuchs, bureaucracy – are identified, but attention is also paid to those whose agency in political life was highly significant, if less frequently discussed: kinship and friendship networks, women, urban communities and charismatic holy figures.

  • 1 - Political Culture in Three Spheres
  • Edited by Catherine Holmes, University of Oxford, Jonathan Shepard, University of Oxford, Jo van Steenbergen, Björn Weiler, Aberystwyth University
  • Book: Political Culture in the Latin West, Byzantium and the Islamic World, c.700–c.1500
  • Published online: 11 August 2021
  • Print publication: 26 August 2021, pp 1-16
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    Summary

    This introduction outlines the key aims of the book and its genesis, including a definition of what political culture means – the rituals and explicit legitimisation of power, status and property-holding, alongside the unstated assumptions and customs that help to channel tensions and rivalries within polities. It situates the volume’s approach – a presentation of three neighbouring and overlapping political spheres – within the recent turn towards the global middle ages. Neither a work of systematic and explicit comparison nor an attempt at overarching synthesis or grand narrative – nor a shot at tracing trans-regional connections – the book aims rather to find a conceptual language applicable to all three spheres, attempting to make each sphere accessible to non-specialists. This pioneering survey of three spheres – the Latin west, Byzantium and the Islamic world – should provide useful tools for learning, teaching and research today but is also an invitation to future study of medieval political culture.

Political Culture in the Latin West, Byzantium and the Islamic World, c.700–c.1500
  • Political Culture in the Latin West, Byzantium and the Islamic World, c.700–c.1500
  • A Framework for Comparing Three Spheres
  • Edited by Catherine Holmes, Jonathan Shepard, Jo van Steenbergen, Björn Weiler
  • Published online: 11 August 2021
  • Print publication: 26 August 2021
  • View description
    This comparative study explores three key cultural and political spheres – the Latin west, Byzantium and the Islamic world from Central Asia to the Atlantic – roughly from the emergence of Islam to the fall of Constantinople. These spheres drew on a shared pool of late antique Mediterranean culture, philosophy and science, and they had monotheism and historical antecedents in common. Yet where exactly political and spiritual power lay, and how it was exercised, differed. This book focuses on power dynamics and resource-allocation among ruling elites; the legitimisation of power and property with the aid of religion; and on rulers' interactions with local elites and societies. Offering the reader route-maps towards navigating each sphere and grasping the fundamentals of its political culture, this set of parallel studies offers a timely and much needed framework for comparing the societies surrounding the medieval Mediterranean.
  • Emotional recognition training modifies neural response to emotional faces but does not improve mood in healthy volunteers with high levels of depressive symptoms
  • Ian S. Penton-Voak, Sally Adams, Katherine S. Button, Meg Fluharty, Michael Dalili, Michael Browning, Emily A. Holmes, Catherine J. Harmer, Marcus R. Munafò
  • Journal: Psychological Medicine / Volume 51 / Issue 7 / May 2021
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 February 2020, pp. 1211-1219
  • Print publication: May 2021
  • View abstract
    Background

    There is demand for new, effective and scalable treatments for depression, and development of new forms of cognitive bias modification (CBM) of negative emotional processing biases has been suggested as possible interventions to meet this need.

    Methods

    We report two double blind RCTs, in which volunteers with high levels of depressive symptoms (Beck Depression Inventory ii (BDI-ii) > 14) completed a brief course of emotion recognition training (a novel form of CBM using faces) or sham training. In Study 1 (N = 36), participants completed a post-training emotion recognition task whilst undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate neural correlates of CBM. In Study 2 (N = 190), measures of mood were assessed post-training, and at 2-week and 6-week follow-up.

    Results

    In both studies, CBM resulted in an initial change in emotion recognition bias, which (in Study 2) persisted for 6 weeks after the end of training. In Study 1, CBM resulted in increases neural activation to happy faces, with this effect driven by an increase in neural activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and bilateral amygdala. In Study 2, CBM did not lead to a reduction in depressive symptoms on the BDI-ii, or on related measures of mood, motivation and persistence, or depressive interpretation bias at either 2 or 6-week follow-ups.

    Conclusions

    CBM of emotion recognition has effects on neural activity that are similar in some respects to those induced by Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRI) administration (Study 1), but we find no evidence that this had any later effect on self-reported mood in an analogue sample of non-clinical volunteers with low mood (Study 2).

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