Hello everyone and welcome to the history of Byzantium.

Episode 338, Get Rid of Byzantium with Leonora Neville.

You may remember Professor Neville from episodes 197 and 224,

where I talked to her about Anna Komnini,

and the histories written by her and her husband,

Nikki Foras Varyennios.

In today's episode, she makes the case

for getting rid of the term Byzantium for good and replacing it with something else.

She's written a manifesto of sorts to make her case and will take us through the main arguments today.

I won't give you the title of that manifesto till the end of the interview for reasons that will become obvious.

But it is a fun and easy read, so I recommend you check it out.

We didn't actually talk about this part in the interview, but at the beginning of the

manifesto she talks about modern uses of the term Byzantine.

Now most of you will know that in English it means something that's intricate, complicated, inflexible and rigid.

So you see headlines like Byzantine water laws will leave Californians high and dry.

But I had no idea that it has slightly different but still negative meanings in other languages.

So in Dutch it means hair splitting.

In German it means ceremonial and slavish. In French it can be used for endless and purposeless debates, while in Polish it can stand in for hypocrisy or the presentation of the bad as good.

She concludes, quote, that while traditions differ on what precisely is wrong with Byzantine, there is a remarkable international consensus that it is

deplorable. As you'll hear in our interview, she is less concerned about the specific word,

and more the ways in which the Byzantines are siphoned off from the rest of Roman history and made into their own thing, with various damaging consequences.

Professor Neville is the John W. and Gene M. Rowe chair of Byzantine history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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