CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture
“Managing Emotion in the Byzantine Twelfth Century: The Consolations of Rhetoric”
Wednesday, November 12, 2008\

In this lecture, CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Margaret Mullett (Queen’s University Belfast) demonstrated that Byzantine consolationes in prose and verse—speeches, poems and letters—are anything but literary exercises; rather, they use the power of rhetoric to serve the bereaved. Professor Mullett considered reactions to death in Byzantium, the representation and conception of emotion, portraiture (of deceased and bereaved), and the potential of different literary (and visual) forms.