Anthony Kaldellis is Professor and Chair of the Department of Classics at The Ohio State University. He is the author of many books, including The Christian Parthenon, Hellenism in Byzantium, and The Byzantine Republic, which have been translated into French, Greek, and Russian.
Romanland is brilliant. With great lucidity, Anthony Kaldellis
challenges us to set aside an immense tradition of misdirection. He
excavates the conceits by which the West created ‘Byzantium’—and
itself—and then demolishes them. Only then do we see what was in
fact there all along: a community of Romans, and a polity of
remarkable creativity and endurance. This is tremendous
scholarship.
*Clifford Ando, author of Roman Social Imaginaries*
Ethnicity in the later Roman empire has been highly contested and
immensely controversial, from medieval times to the present. Like a
Hercules cleaning the Augean stables, Kaldellis is purging the
field of the nationalistic contentions and prejudices that have
beset scholarship, starting with the artificial name ‘Byzantium.’
This blockbuster of a book performs for ‘Byzantine’ Studies the
service that Edward Said’s Orientalism did for Arabic and Islamic
Studies. Romanland offers a clean slate for serious and
sophisticated study, with love and empathy, of the history of these
societies.
*Dimitri Gutas, author of Greek Thought, Arabic Culture*
In his most persuasive work to date, Kaldellis calls an astonishing
number of medieval witnesses to testify that they were Romans,
rather than the ‘Byzantines’ scholars have wanted them to be. This
extraordinary book should shift the ground under Byzantine
studies.
*Leonora Neville, author of Guide to Byzantine Historical
Writing*
Fascinating…Kaldellis’s scholarship is always learned, but also
fiercely iconoclastic, tearing down orthodoxies that have stood for
centuries…[An] innovative and eye-opening book by one of the most
important Byzantinists working today.
*New Criterion*
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