Events Calendar

Join us for a talk by Jake Ransohoff, Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Bowdoin College, about the intersection of punishment, incapacity, and exclusion in the Byzantine world. Ransohoff will focus on a particular penalty — blinding — commonly used by Byzantium’s rulers to disqualify rivals from positions of political leadership. Despite its official justification as a merciful alternative to death, “political” blinding in Byzantium often backfired and provoked popular opposition. Drawing on evidence from across the medieval Mediterranean, he will examine the sightless body as an unstable site of meaning: whether it reflected the compassion, or the injustice, of the state remained an open question. It is blinding’s ability to provoke contestation and controversy that makes it revealing of persistent tensions across Byzantium’s millenary history.