Utilising new methodological approaches to understanding not only the poor as a social and economic group but also of the internal means of stratification which informed social organisation within local communities, this book looks at the place of the poor within the multi-layered hierarchies of Byzantine society using evidence from archaeology, art, architecture, as well as narrative, theological, and legal texts. Rather than treating the different levels of society independently, it looks at the social interactions which replicated and reinforced hierarchies but were also subject to negotiation within local communities. Fifteen leading Byzantine scholars discuss and analyse the topic of social hierarchies in the Byzantine Empire, covering topics such as working lives, the material world, the stratification of space, and philanthropy and social obligation. The book will appeal to scholars and students alike interested in identity formation and expression in the Byzantine provinces, as well as those researching the social history of the poor in Byzantium, and the mechanisms of hierarchies, social marginalisation, and oppression. Chapter 15 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license

Table of Contents:
Introduction 1 Voicing the Rich and the Poor in Byzantium, a Methodological Problem Anna C. Kelley and Flavia Vanni 2 Being poor in Byzantium Chris Wickham Part I: Working Lives 3 Who ate all the pepper? Consumers and consumables in the Mediterranean c. AD 1-800 Rebecca Darley 4 Individual or collective? Stucco-workers in Middle and Late Byzantine construction sites. Flavia Vanni 5 No lilies of the field: Teens and children at work Cecily Hennessy Part II: The Material World in Life and Death 6 Trickling down, trickling up, and holding things together with crossed diagonals Eunice Dauterman Maguire 7 The reactions of the (relatively) poor to the art of the elite Henry Maguire 8 Hierarchy, economy, piety: Late Antique funerary textiles from Egypt in context Anna C. Kelley Part III: The Stratification of Space 9 Competitive piety: Rural patrons in Byzantine Arabia and Palaestina, c.500-c.630 Daniel Reynolds 10 Contextualizing secular representations in Marathos, Mani Mark Pawlowski 11 ‘The Poor shall eat and be satisfied’: the ideal of Christian poverty in the refectories of Constantinople Jessica Varsallona Part IV: Philanthropy and Social Obligation 12 Poverty, imperial philanthropy, and political ideology in the historical accounts of Michael Psellos and Michael Attaleiates Francisco Lopez Santos-Kornberger 13 Fraudulent beggars and fake monks: unease about almsgiving in Late Antiquity Jaclyn Maxwell 14 ‘Charity begins at the monastery’: Elite female philanthropy in the Palaiologan Period Lauren Wainwright 15 Poor in this world but not in the next? The commemoration of the Dead among the Byzantine non-elite (ca. 300-1100) Zachary Chitwood Conclusion 16 Looking for the poor in Byzantium: an epilogue Leslie Brubaker