Here in the Netherlands it is the perfect weather to cozy up in a chair by the fire and lose yourself in a book – unless you are a big fan of cold, rain, and ill-timed gusts of wind, that is! And the more pages such a book encompasses, at least in my experience, the better it can help you to forget the outside world for a while. Which nicely ties in to a question that I got from one of the readers of the Bildungblocks-newsletter and which I want to discuss with you today: How hefty were Roman books?¹

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Traveling by train some years ago, I decided that I wanted to learn the Gothic language. And this became one of those things I have sporadically undertaken in my spare time since then. Most of us will associate the term Gothic – as a moniker for a group of peoples and their language, as opposed to the similarly named literary, architectural and vibe genres – with the Roman Empire.¹ And this is understandable, as the Goths rose to prominence during late antiquity and most of our sources come from this period.² And their language, for most intents and purposes, seems to have largely died out in the second half of the first millennium CE.³ But what struck me when researching the Goths, is the longevity of one branch of their language in Eastern Europe, which survived way longer than the commonly perceived end point of Gothic and that we are primarily aware of because of one sedulous letter writer from the sixteenth century CE. Thus, today we will discuss the drawn-out demise of the Gothic language.

Continue reading The Longevity of Gothic and the Importance of Writing Letters →

Apparently the people I’m surrounded by, care more about me than I ever dared hope for. Because, at the beginning of this month I was surprised with the beautiful new book The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium by Anthony Kaldellis.¹ Within its tasteful red cover one can find more than a thousand pages of the good stuff: an engagingly written, thoroughly researched and amply annotated history of the Eastern Roman Empire. And already on the first few pages Kaldellis makes a very interesting point. Despite the subtitle of that very volume, he postulates that the moniker ‘Byzantine’ is maybe not a good fit for the Eastern Roman Empire.² And considering that by all accounts you lot cannot seem to stop thinking about the Roman Empire, I want to take the time today to explain how the Eastern Roman Empire became Byzantine.³

Continue reading How the Eastern Roman Empire Became Byzantine →