 Thank you, all three of you, for these very articulate and very elegantly presented papers. I was struck, as I'm sure many of you were, by the dialogue between Shannon's paper and Rachel's paper. I'm sure you will have your own questions for each other. Actually, maybe we should start with that. I would love for you to, if you have questions for each other, to go ahead, or I can launch into my own. I think you should feel free to ask me, I need to marinate a little bit before I ask a question. Yes, please do. So with what Shannon was talking about, and then thinking about your paper, and you were talking about the materiality of gold, and the importance of gold, I couldn't help but think about those garnets in the middle, that are right at the center, and are they always garnets, or are they glass, I don't know who to look at, do I look at them, or I mean. I can only talk to my objects, but they are garnets, and in the occasion of one of the crosses, the one from White Low, it was actually found with the setting empty, but I think because of other examples, they actually fitted a new one in there, I think in the 18th century, which was faceted, which is not typical of Anglo-Saxon garnet work. Just thinking about the prevalence of garnets that is so common in Anglo-Saxon work from this period, I mean I just didn't know if you had any thoughts about garnets, I mean I've never thought about what the garnet means. I did get this question in York as well, everyone's very interested in the garnets as am I, and there's actually a paper that just came out in 2017 that I have not read yet that is all about garnets and their symbolism. The only sources that I've read have just equated the red color to the blood of Christ, but then gold is also compared to the glory of kings, so there is certainly a Christological association, but Leslie Webster talks a lot about the contrast, so the contrast of the red and the gold, and I wish I knew how to embed a video into PowerPoint presentations because I actually got to handle one of those crosses at the British Museum, and in the study room the windows are so high and light is perfect and I was actually able to take a video of the play of light off the surfaces as I turned it, so. And that was one of the points that struck me between your two papers was the importance of light, that it was not about, of course colors, comes from light, but the idea of light and not color as the focus of the theory, I wonder if you could speak more to that. I think in two ways, because with the morning papers we were talking about making the immaterial material, so that's one line of thinking, another line of thinking that I saw in both of your papers was Rachel in your paper you were talking about the use of light as a reaction to environmental conditions, and in Shannon in your paper you were talking about the use of, you know, recreating light as a way to control nature, so I wondered if you could talk to both of those points. I mean, I can start by saying that there's just a vast body of scholarship on the importance of light in Byzantium, it's one of the most recurrent themes of what they valued in terms of aesthetics, so in ecstasies or descriptions of churches or decorative programs, it's just light this and light that and reflection this and mirror that, and if you just look at the prevalence of mosaic as a decoration strategy, you can really see it. What I think is interesting in the case of this recipe is that they're not interested in light that reflects, they're interested in something that gives off its own light, this is a different kind of power, this is something that lets you do things that you could otherwise not do with natural light, so this is a kind of, I don't want to say supernatural because it's something that happens in nature and they're very clear about that, but it's a powerful thing, it's a sort of special kind of light, and that's what's really interesting, and like Rachel, I wish I could embed a video, the most interesting thing to me was the antithesis of what I was expecting, which is Byzantine enamel looks like it would reflect a lot in bright light, it doesn't, when it's in bright light the gold reflects off everything and the enamel becomes almost like a silhouette, the enamel glows when there's no light or when there's very little light because the gold becomes dimmed and the glass and the glass formulations are able to absorb and then reflect the light back out, so that seems to be a play of light that they were very aware of and manipulating in a different way than they would do with mosaics which capitalize on natural light. That's an interesting dichotomy because of course a lot of these enamel objects are small, portable, handheld things versus the architectural interiors that you find interesting, so that's... They did make very large architectural features out of enamel, they just don't survive. I should open this up to questions for the audience. I have a question for Shana. Thank you. So are theories of extramission applied to that type of material versus understanding other alternatives such as intramission for other materials? I mean, I've never heard it discussed explicitly that way or seen it come up that way in literature. There's very little discussion of the affective nature of enamel. There's a lot of discussion of its implementation in spectacle and court ritual and in church processions and things like that. In one case, the light isn't ever talked about about extramission or intramission but it's often described in poetry as being visually disruptive. It's described often in poetry as enameled armor on soldiers or fantastic fighters and it blinds their opponents. So it's often something that disrupts vision. Thank you. I just want to share something with Shana and Rachel and my colleague Jean Campbell at Emory. We talk a lot about materials and about teaching with materials. I've never done this but she with students shines with garnets, direct artificial light, like a flashlight, and apparently they do something wow-inducing, very extraordinary. It's the kind of refracting of the light or luminescence. They have, but it's not something internal to them but with an artificial, very direct, strong light they will amaze. Let me speak into the fuzzy dice here. Caitlin, I'm just wondering if you could extend the discussion into the architectural decoration, particularly of polyuktos, where you have gems or gem-like glass inlaid in the columns and the marble was painted, et cetera, et cetera. I'm just wondering, because you did this wonderful juxtaposition of real peacocks with the stone-carved peacocks, were the peacocks themselves painted? That's a great question and there's a lot of debate about whether or not those peacocks in St. Polyuktos were painted. We know that the inscription that surrounds the peacocks, that they definitely had a blue background and the letters themselves were probably gilded, which is very similar to the types of church inscriptions that you see in places like Rome that are still extant in Mosaic, for example. The peacocks themselves though, it's hard to know if they were painted, because we don't have any pigment that survives on them. It would make sense to me that they would be painted, but I don't think it's necessarily that important, given what you were alluding to, the installation inside the church, aside from these ridiculous peacocks, there were also, I mean they're over the top, but there were also in the chiborium or the Templon screen, the columns themselves were made of the same type of Prokinesian marble that was inlaid with glass that's meant to mimic gemstones and also amethyst gemstones. So you have real gemstones and mimicked gemstones being embedded into the architectural fabric. I think the choice of color is also quite important to consider with those columns, which I should have brought a picture of, but these columns, so they have gold glass that would have surrounded each of these sort of cabochons of green glass and also of amethyst, and so these are the colors of peacock feathers. So it's another layer of this peacock imagery, kind of pervading the interior of that really over-the-top space, sacred space, which is important to remember. Down on that question, does decoration survive from, or the structure doesn't survive, but does any evidence of the decoration of Cento Stefano survive? That's a great question, and no. Too mad. I know. So Cento Stefano is tough, because we have the floor plan, but we don't have anything else, and we have the footings of the columns, so we can get the sense of the space, and it's a really conservative type of architectural style. You know, it's a Basilica style. It has one name with little side aisles, maybe a little bit of a transept. One thing that is interesting about Cento Stefano is that there was a baptistry attached to the back of it that was created out of one of the rooms in the villa. So thinking about the creation of new Christians in the 5th century out in, you know, kind of on the edge of the city is a little weird. And also underneath the chancel, so underneath the altar, there was some kind of a crypt down there. Unfortunately, there were no relics of Stephen there, but a lot of people have wondered whether or not, you know, could this have been intended for some kind of a space where relics could have been kept. But that's as far as we can go. We do have, and I showed the example, we do have some of the marble sculptures from the villa, which was still on display at some point while the church was still in use. So you have some of these classical sculptures that are still decorating the rooms that are, you know, kind of supporting the sides of the church, which is really interesting. So thinking about that play of this Christian sacred space rising out of this thoroughly pagan, this old Roman villa. But that's as far as I can go. I would love to go farther. X-rays of the enamels that you were showing, and I was really struck by this use of the gold wire for cloisonne, but that's not actually making cloison. But rather it's giving a sort of modeling effect of further shaping how light is reflecting and refracting. And to me, this seems really interesting as part of a representational project, because modeling, as you think about it in painting, is trying to achieve three dimensions by showing light and shadows as it's working across a three-dimensional shape. And actually you're getting the same effect, or kind of striving for the same effect, but using completely different means of using gold wire and light and glass. I just wanted to see if you've been thinking about it in that way, or if you had other thoughts about kind of the representational qualities paired with the technical work that you're doing, which is fabulous. So it looks, when I show it like this, like the cloison wire, which is not visible, it would seem to make sense that it would be sort of pushing the level of the glass up to create these modeling effects that you're talking about, but it doesn't. You don't actually. Only when it's under transparent glass. When it's under the opaque glass, you can't see it whatsoever. So enamel is always polished all the way down so that it's level with the metal. So you would be able to see those wires. They would have to be raised to such a degree that the glass wouldn't be able to cover them to create these modeling effects. I'm having a hard time describing it. Are the cloisons that are hidden, are they shorter? They're shorter. So they're shorter. They don't actually affect the refraction of light on the surface of the glass. When it's transparent, it does. Because then the light will pass through the glass and bounce off the submerged wires. So I've asked myself this question. Why are the wires that can't be seen under the opaque glass, why are they sort of figural? Why are they modeling hair or expressions of the forehead and the hands? And part of it is practical. Part of it is it helps the glass adhere and prevents it from cracking and breaking and falling out. But I have to wonder to myself, in that particular collection of enamels, some of the halos are opaque and some of them are translucent, but the wires are present in all of them. Which leads me to believe that in the one sense, this is the decision for what color the glass would be was made after the design. And it was kind of, I think they must have decided based on what the object was that these were on originally. And we don't know what the original object was that they were attached to. It would have probably played off of the aesthetic sensibilities of that object. The other thing I wonder is if part of this is just part of the artistic working process. So if you're an enamel or you're making enamels of different kinds, just these roundels or whatever, you're used to fashioning wires that are outlining figures and features and that sort of thing. And why would you not continue to do that anyway? It also helps refine the artist's sensibility for those figures and those shapes of wire. But it's something I'm still working through because I got to the same conclusion you did, that it was creating different effects of light on the surface of the glass, and it does that behind translucent fill, not under the opaque ones, and they were still doing it. And it's not just on this object, it's on objects in Venice, it's in Georgia, and things like that. So thank you. I was struck by the fact that all three papers somehow had something to do with or were interested in the manner in which materials were set in some kind of relation to nature, the natural world. And I know, I'm a scholar of the 18th and 19th century, so I know my nature is not your nature. And what I'm about to say might grossly simplify what each of you was arguing, but it struck me that each of you was describing a different kind of relation between materials and nature. So in the case of the peacocks, it was a relation of imitation, right? So figural imitation, but also the use of materials to imitate colors and the effects of those colors in combination. And in the case of the enamel, the relation was something like, not a substitution because, of course, you so rightly said these are natural properties, but it's something like enamel as its own natural world, right? And then in the case of the crosses, you described an interactivity between the wearable cross and meteorology and climate and gray skies and so on and so forth, but also light as an atmospheric phenomenon. And so I'm wondering if these, the configurations of these relationships that you described, I mean, do they come from contemporaneous discourses about the natural world or about the relationships imagined between different living entities or humans and the non-human? Are there these larger discourses on which these practices drew? Because I was so struck by the fact that each paper was about, I'm simplifying, but some kind of relation of this sort. I'm dealing with a primarily pre-literate people until the introduction of Christianity. So a lot of the poetry that's been written down, one would assume is coming through an oral tradition into, you know, into writing. But the natural world is only described in poems like The Seafarer or St. Gufflack's Writings because he decided to be a hermit in a very unpleasant place. So it's really only in poetry that we find that in the Anglo-Saxon world and not really anywhere else. As Ciara Dodd well points out, that's the only mention of the actual physical environment. When it comes to interaction with the animal world, there's certainly more description of that. But I just thought, I was just struck by the fact that the old English language had specific words, not just for red, blue, green, but varying brightnesses. And I thought that was the strongest argument to argue for a sensitivity to light in that particular environment which they had been in for some time. And if we, you know, believe bead or if we believe, you know, the various genealogical or genetic, you know, migration patterns that are being put forth right now, if we generally assume that these are northern people from Scandinavia or from German areas, you would assume that the environment would be similar. Although it's a very disparate amount of people coming in and that's the whole problem with the word Anglo-Saxon and that's a whole other argument. But yeah, I definitely think that there's a relation to nature, especially the forces of nature sort of being synonymous with the forces that are supernatural. I don't think that there was really a bifurcation of those in popular thought. And then that sort of conditioned, not only crosses, which were conditioned not only by, I think, this sensitivity to the environment, but also by, culturally, by continental fashions, you know, a relationship with Frankish kingdoms where it was the fashion to use golden garnets. But I definitely think of all the fashions they could have chosen, there must be some other reasons behind it, you know, that are more deeply biological. I think there's a lot at play. You can't reduce one to culture. You can't reduce one to biology, so. Is there a reason to look at those period descriptions or configurations of human-animal relations to get a sense of what relationality as such was conceived, how it was conceived of in the period so that you might develop a kind of armature or framework for thinking, okay, well, if this is period understanding of relationality, how might that help me describe this network of relations that's being established among atmospheric phenomena, materials, and bodies? That seems like a place you might want to go. I absolutely agree. I mean, the annulatic tradition, one of my slides, had a beaver's tooth, which was very prominent in female grades as are these crosses are most prominent in female grades. So that's an interesting relation. Yeah. And in other parts of my research, I've actually talked about helmets from this period, which typically, we have about three examples that we mainly refer to, but one from Betty Grange has a nasal with a cross protecting the forehead where you can also be blessed at the sign of the cross and yet at the top is a bore, a heraldic or protective bore with garnet eyes set into the bore. Right. And that's found close to some other artifacts of the cross. And then even the copper gate helmet has over the crossbars. There's an inscription of protection, invoking God for protection. And yet there's a dragon that comes down the nasal. So there's certainly a synchronicity between, there's never the end of paganism in the beginning of Christianity. So there's these ideas are call us saying, and I think the protective element extends not only to protection from, or competition with animals, because I think there was that relationship for the Anglo-Saxons. There was both of those elements happening. And then this protective quality of the cross. So merged into certain elements like the, or certain objects like the Betty Grange helmet. Just to jump off of from the animal discussion. You're a tough person. So the peacocks are interesting. We have lots of descriptions of peacock, lots of ancient descriptions of peacocks. Their behavior was known. They were bred. I mean in my dissertation I go well into this. Going well into it so I'm excited. So there's lots of discussions about this. And they are also used in poetry. And I think most interestingly for these patrons, which unlike Rachel's, they are highly literate. The Aniki Julliana especially, she would have been raised in a very classically educated household. And in those educational settings, they were in late antiquity, they would be doing these ecophastic exercises, where they would recite and they would write down and copy from memory. These descriptions of all sorts of things, from buildings to plants. And there's one really lovely example that in a longer version of this paper that I gave a few years ago, is in a crassus on a peacock. And what a peacock does. And it's not just a peacock walking around with its tail down, because that's not exciting. It's a peacock with its tail spread. And I think what's interesting is that so often when you see images of peacocks in early Christian churches, and they are literally everywhere. I mean, I get pictures of them all the time. Look at this peacock I found. Of course you did. But these peacocks, what is so significant about them is that they aren't the kind of docile images of them with their tails down. They are actually in this aggressive pose. When peacocks, if anybody's been to a zoo or been to, I guess, some rich person's house and they have peacocks walking around, they're very aggressive and they're loud and they're obnoxious. And when they have their tails up, they're in a gesture of mating. So it has to do with this aggression. I think that in some cases it's pushing against the boundary of what is and is not appropriate for inclusion inside a church. And I think that, you know, you can have mosaics of peacocks with their tails up, so at San Butale in the presbytery of the kind of groin vault over the presbytery, there are peacocks with their tails up, but it's not as conspicuous as it is in St. Pauliactos where it literally is a gauntlet. You walk in and you would have just been bombarded with these images. And it's very possible, given what we know about garden culture in St. Constantinople, that Eichia Giuliana on the grounds of her palace could have had peacocks walking around. I mean, that was also a status symbol. So it's very, very possible that people going to the complex could have passed by one of those loud and obnoxious peacocks and then walk in and they see all these quiet ones, thankfully. But yeah, it's interesting. So they are very much part of the classical and then into late antiquity, they're still continuing. And then medieval Byzantium, too. Yeah, I love them. I'll keep it a brief answer to this, which is that, again, I'm dealing with a highly literate section of the Byzantine populace. These are scholars who are writing these alchemical texts, and we don't know exactly who they are, how they're learning, but they're very literate people and they're drawing on a long literary tradition. What I find most interesting about the alchemical texts in Byzantium, which are very understudied, there's a small group of people working on them, but they're not a full part of the Byzantine studies canon as of yet. They are all about nature. They are trying to understand nature through artistic techniques, which is where I've drawn upon Pamela H. Smith, because I do believe that these scholars are actually using interaction with artisans to learn about things like geology and metals and even red baking or explosive making or whatever. But what I find most fascinating about this genre is that the undercurrent of all of this is not just to learn about nature, but to control it, to direct it towards the ends that you want to behave under. In some cases that means artificially reproducing it. It means accelerating natural processes, or even making a natural process have a kind of surprising end that it wouldn't have on its own. So the discourse is very much of controlling nature and discovering it for the purposes of control. I think I have the whatever you call this. And thank you all. It was terrific papers, and I love to hear the emphasis on the materiality. And light. We use so many inappropriate jargon terms that are modern. Illumination is actually a medieval term. And it's not about color, it's about brightness. And with a lot of scriptural connotations as well. I just wanted to say a word of peacocks. I'm also sometimes accused of being obsessed with peacocks. But I think in this particular case, they are everywhere, but nowhere else with this intensity as the super subject. And I just wonder whether since your project is about the assertion of aristocratic privilege and in a family that does have such strong classicizing roots, whether the fact that the peacock is Juno's bird is really, she's making a claim about her own, she should be queen. Oh, absolutely. And that is certainly an acute, you know, into this as I am. And he usually has, when the emperor, two emperors before Justinian, she thought that her son should be emperor. And he was passed over for Justinian's uncle. And then Justinian took power. So there's this, you know, sort of, it's an apocryphal story. We don't know how an anecdotal story about Justinian visiting St. Pauliachtos and going there to collect money from her, right? So, yeah, you know the story. So he goes to collect money from her and she says, oh, I don't have any money right now. I have to collect it for you. So come back in two weeks and I'll give you your money. He comes back in two weeks. She takes them. She's this old lady, okay? And they walk into the church and she says, look up your money. You know, the gold is on the beams of this church. Do what you want with it. And of course he's not going to desecrate a church. He's not going to remove those golden beams. So, yeah. So there is definitely this power play, these power plays that are happening. And the peacock, I argue in my larger project, is really a perfect animal and symbol for this type of aggressive self-promotion for sure, because that's what a peacock does, you know? And I knew Juliana knew that. Are we doing on time? Time to go. Okay, so I think we have to wrap up this session. This has been really exciting. Gems and peacocks. Thank you very much.