Modest Luxury: Jewelry and Meaning in Byzantium and the Wider Eurasian Context
Thursday, February 13, 2025
12:30 PM – 1:30 PM
Buchanan Tower, Room 997, 1873 East Mall, UBC Vancouver
Or register to attend over Zoom
Valued for its beauty, intricate production processes, and often the precious raw materials it contained, jewelry had a ubiquitous presence in medieval Europe. As the quintessential accessory, jewelry was an essential element of official (and sometimes non-official) attire throughout the Middle Ages. Though the medium still sits at the margins of the history of medieval art, especially in comparison to other forms of portable material culture, recent specialist scholarship has stepped outside the world’s museum galleries to consider how jewelry items were treated in the global medieval world as objects of sale, trade, and diplomatic exchange. Due to jewelry’s historical affiliation with luxury and elite culture, the question of whether and how jewelry mattered for the people of underprivileged socioeconomic backgrounds across empires and polities remains open.
In this talk, I intend to examine the reasons behind jewelry’s identification as an elite category of artifacts and discuss precious items made for and used by non-elites far from the metropolitan centers of the medieval world. My focus is primarily on the Byzantine empire and its eastern European and Middle Eastern neighbors. In doing this, I draw on finds from excavated cemeteries in mainland Greece. Ultimately, the aim is to initiate a discussion about taste and access to trade routes by the ordinary people, who formed the majority of the population in the Middle Ages.
Speaker Bio:
Georgios Makris is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of British Columbia. He specializes in Byzantine art and archaeology, placing particular emphasis on religious landscapes and material culture. An active archaeologist, he has participated in several archaeological projects and currently directs an excavation project in northern Greece, supported by SSHRC and involving UBC undergraduates. This project studies the archaeological remains and ceramics from the port-city of Maroneia from the ninth to the fifteenth century CE. Makris has written on portraits of private individuals in Byzantium, the relationship between lay and monastic communities, and, lately, on jewelry, bodily adornment and trans-empire trade. He recently co-organized the annual fall colloquium at Harvard University’s Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, on the topic of disabled bodies in Byzantium.