Classics and Medieval Studies

Byzantine Studies

In 2016, the department of Classics of the Maison française d’Oxford has expanded its activities. Up to now it was dedicated to all aspects of the ancient world (philology, philosophy, history, archaeology), and now it also covers the study of the Byzantine world. The history of the Eastern Roman Empire during the Middle Ages has been a favoured topic both of French scholarships since Louis XIV, if not François Ier, and of its Oxonian counterpart, thanks to a unique synergy between the faculties of classics, history and oriental studies.
This new orientation stems from the recent questioning of traditional historical periodisation, allowing for a global approach of the long transition phase which resulted from the collapse of the unified Mediterranean Roman world with equal interest towards each of the three political and religious entities heirs of the Roman Empire: the Germanic Kingdoms in the west, the Greek-speaking Empire of Byzantium and the caliphate(s). In this framework, particular attention is paid to contact zones, especially Sicily, Cyprus or the Adriatic.
Furthermore, the development of studies on medieval Orthodoxy leads to an additional interest in the Early modern legacy of the Byzantine empire and its impact on the nation-building processes in Eastern Europe. This thematic approach complements the strictly chronological definition of the scientific sphere of interest of the department.

Social history of the late Middle Ages : Intellectuals and their Social Imaginary (Antoine Destemberg)

The social history of the Western Middle Ages as considered in the research programmes conducted within the MFO is above all a history of social imaginaries. It is less a question of developing a quantitative history, devoted to the trajectories of individuals or populations, than of studying the discourses produced and disseminated on the architecture of medieval society and its dynamics. Devoted to the affirmation of a sociological discourse at the end of the Middle Ages (12th-15th centuries), this study thus pays particular attention both to the authors of these performative discourses, who possess the intellectual tools to develop a “prose of the world,” and to the lexical and theoretical tools they use to order and classify the social world. With this in mind, the first part of the study focuses on the learned elites (theologians, jurists, philosophers, and physicians) trained at universities (particularly Oxford and Paris) as “organic intellectuals,” i.e., those who accompany socio-political transformations with the legitimising force of their discourse. Secondly, the various vectors for the dissemination of their sociological ideas outside the academic sphere are studied in order to measure the extent to which they influenced the social, political, and administrative practices of the ruling elites.