Architecture and Interaction in the Thirteenth-Century Mediterranean

The remains of churches and monasteries throughout the mountainous landscape of the Greek Peloponnesos - the Morea, as it then was known - attest to the interaction of western Europeans and Byzantine Greeks following the Fourth Crusade of 1204 C.E. Architecture and Interaction in the Thirteenth-Century Mediterranean: Building Identity in the Medieval Morea presents fourteen, under-studied monuments in order to assess the role of buildings and their ornamentation in the creation of identity in this Mediterranean region. Architecture and Interaction investigates and reframes scholarly conceptualizations of cultural interaction and revives the ancient Greek term methexis, meaning communion or participation, to elucidate the material culture of complex societies characterized by ever-changing cultural encounters. The book explores the mechanisms of exchange of architectural knowledge and memory among patrons, architects, masons, and viewers. A fully illustrated Appendix catalogs each church - some for the first time in English - and the study creates a model for contextually specific readings of architecture and identity. Architecture and Interaction is geared to scholars and students of both eastern and western medieval architecture and history (as well as historians of architecture in other contact zones) and also to those interested in cross-cultural theory and identity studies.

Heather E. Grossman is Visiting Lecturer in the School of Architecture, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA.