The volume Death, Illness, Body and Soul in Written and Visual Culture in Byzantium and Late Medieval Balkans explores the ways in which the Byzantines and the Serbs in the late Middle Ages understood and represented death, illness, the relations between body and soul, and the questions of life and afterlife.
Confronted with a pandemic of the Black Plague from the middle of the fourteenth century and the overwhelming power of the Muslim Ottoman invaders that threatened their existence, men and women of the broader Byzantine world sought solace in their Orthodox Christian faith, in the acceptance of the finite nature of earthly life, and above all in the preparations for the afterlife in hope and expectation of eternal bliss.
The papers in this volume offer original and innovative analyses of the attitudes toward the basic questions of human existence, and bring to life the people of Byzantium and late medieval Balkans through a series of studied examples of deeply personal expressions of their world-view, their faith, hopes and fears.
Editor: Professor Vlada Stanković, PhD
