Open AccessLate Byzantium in the Works of Margarita A. Poljakovskaja
Author(s) -
Tatiana Kushch
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
antičnaâ drevnostʹ i srednie veka
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2687-0398
pISSN - 0320-4472
DOI - 10.15826/adsv.2020.48.001
Subject(s) - byzantine architecture , history , byzantine studies , classics , empire , fifteenth , politics , rhetoric , philology , power (physics) , biography , key (lock) , ancient history , literature , sociology , art , law , art history , philosophy , political science , gender studies , feminism , theology , physics , quantum mechanics , ecology , biology
This paper commemorates Margarita Adol’fovna Poljakovskaja (1933–2020), the head of the Ural school of Byzantine studies and the respected authority in the history and culture of late Byzantium. The author makes the reader acquainted with Professor Poljakovskaja’s academic biography, the topics of her researches, and the results of her studies in various aspects of the Byzantine history from the thirteenth to fifteenth century. The paper has revealed a few key topics studied by Professor Poljakovskaja: monastic properties in late Byzantine cities; Byzantine rhetoric and epistolography; social and political thought; intellectual life; social structures in the Byzantine society; palace ceremonies and court culture; and the Byzantines’ emotional world and daily life. It has been stated that although Professor Poljakovskaja used abundant and varied methodology produced by historical and philological researches, she preferred the anthropological approach. Her attention concentrated on a person and the person’s notion of the time and self. Reconstructions of intellectual and social life in the period of decline of the Byzantine empire loomed large in the historian’s studies, and the key topic of her researches was the problem of the “person, society, and power”.