Colonizing Christianity employs postcolonial critique to analyze the transformations of Greek and Latin religious identity in the wake of the Fourth Crusade. It argues that the experience colonization splintered the Greek community, which could not agree how best to respond to the Latin other. By offering a close reading of a handful of texts from the era of the Fourth Crusade and subsequent Latin Empire of Byzantium, this book illuminates mechanisms by which Western Christians authorized and exploited the Christian East and, concurrently, the ways in which Eastern Christians understood and responded to the dramatic shift in political and religious fortunes. It offers new insights into the statements of Greek and Latin religious polemic that emerged in the context of the Fourth Crusade and how they more often revealed political or cultural anxiety than they advanced theological ideas. It further demonstrates how the experience of colonial subjugation not only transformed the way that Eastern Christians viewed themselves and the Western Christian other but also how the experience of colonialism opened permanent fissures within the Orthodox community, which struggled to develop a consistent response to aggressive demands for submission to the Roman Church.
Colonizing Christianity employs postcolonial critique to analyze the transformations of Greek and Latin religious identity in the wake of the Fourth Crusade. It argues that the experience colonization splintered the Greek community, which could not agree how best to respond to the Latin other. By offering a close reading of a handful of texts from the era of the Fourth Crusade and subsequent Latin Empire of Byzantium, this book illuminates mechanisms by which Western Christians authorized and exploited the Christian East and, concurrently, the ways in which Eastern Christians understood and responded to the dramatic shift in political and religious fortunes. It offers new insights into the statements of Greek and Latin religious polemic that emerged in the context of the Fourth Crusade and how they more often revealed political or cultural anxiety than they advanced theological ideas. It further demonstrates how the experience of colonial subjugation not only transformed the way that Eastern Christians viewed themselves and the Western Christian other but also how the experience of colonialism opened permanent fissures within the Orthodox community, which struggled to develop a consistent response to aggressive demands for submission to the Roman Church.
Introduction 1
1. Robert de Clari 13
2. Gunther of Pairis’s Hystoria Constantinopolitana 35
3. Innocent’s Ambivalence 49
4. Demetrios Chomatianos: Colonial Resistance and the Fear
of Sacramental Miscegenation 73
5. George Akropolites and the Counterexample(s) 89
6. The Chronicle of Morea 103
Conclusion 123
Acknowledgments 131
Notes 133
Index 177
George E. Demacopoulos is Fr. John Meyendorff & Patterson Family Chair of Orthodox Christian Studies at Fordham University. He is the author of four monographs, most recently The Invention of Peter: Apostolic Discourse and Papal Authority in Late Antiquity and Gregory the Great: Ascetic Pastor and First-Man of Rome. With Aristotle Papanikolaou, he co-founded the Orthodox Christian Studies Center at Fordham University. He presently serves as co-editor of the Journal of Orthodox Christian Studies.
George Demacopoulos's Colonizing Christianity is a truly
extraordinary reevaluation of historical events in light of new
theoretical approaches. It is both ground-breaking and measured,
revolutionary and rooted in historical specificity. Demacopoulos
knows the sources he works with and presents them eloquently. These
sources carry their own historiographical baggage--so much so that
one might doubt the possibility of saying anything new about them.
The author manages, however, to argue convincingly for a new
framework in which to understand these sources, and in so doing
brings them to life in fascinating ways.-- "Journal of Orthodox
Christian Studies"
Colonizing Christianity's analysis of a number of texts through the
lens of colonial and postcolonial theory makes for useful,
important, reading. There are significant stakes both for medieval
historians and those committed to finding pathways of
reconciliation among contemporary Christians.---David Perry, Sacred
Plunder: Venice and the Aftermath of the Fourth Crusade
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