The shape of things to come

This week I chased up a thesis that Donna had found for me on Trove. The Trove link to view it online was broken so I set about searching for it by its title in google.

Given that I knew it was a thesis that was intended to be freely viewable online I reasoned that it would be available to download in several places. So with this logic in mind I searched by its title and found the thesis downloadable from this page.

The thesis I mention is called 'Libraries and Book Culture of the Byzantine Empire'. It deals with the exact same topic I am working on so I expect it to be a great help both for the information it provides and the resources it references in its bibliography.

My plan is to try and track down some of the resources that were used for the thesis and see if there is any of the items available at any of the branchs of my local library.

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Before its division into East and West by the invasion of the Goths and Vandals (these invasions occured in the 2nd & 3rd century A.D) the original Roman Empire was a literary powerhouse of the ancient world.

During the 2nd century the empire still possessed numerous public libraries that stood in testament to the literacy and education of the empire. However by the 4th century the invasions had taken their toll; The empire had been divided and as a Latin scholar in 378 A.D. wrote "the libraries, like tombs, were closed forever".

It was during this period that Constantine the 1st brought into being what we think of today as the Byzantine Empire. Before inaugurating Constantinople as the new seat of the empire he recognized Christianity and began to present himself as Christ's representative on Earth. Christianity was to have a huge impact on this new empire and help shape the form of things yet to come.

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Ilie, B 2007, 'Libraries and Book Culture of the Empire', Master's, University of North Carolina.

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Byzantine Fact: The previous fact directly leads into this week's. Rather then suffer a usurper like Irene to reign as Empress the Pope declared Charlemagne emperor.