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Gender Subversion and the Early Christian East: Reconstructing the Byzantine Comic Mime

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Laughter, Humor, and the (Un)Making of Gender

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Abstract

Scholars of theater have mostly treated Byzantine performance arts schematically, as if they were a literary bridge between antiquity and renaissance for the Roman East.1 Indeed, within the realm of performance arts, the same artistic forms found in Roman entertainment and spectacle also appear in later Greek antiquity: the landscape of popular culture in Byzantium is largely composed of chariot racing in the Hippodrome with comic mimes and serious pantomimes providing theatrical intermissions.2 In spite of this front-stage presence, however, these performances are treated by scholars of theater only fragmentarily, mostly focusing on criticism by the Church: with very few exceptions, scholars are mostly interested in their decline rather than their existence. 3 This narrow conceptualization of the role of Byzantine theater undermines the social and cultural importance of performance in that specific historical milieu. In spite of the overall rich hypotheses, and while there is substantial evidence for the rapid decline of performances, more concrete facts about them remain enigmatic and obscure.4

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Authors
  1. Anna Foka
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Anna Foka Jonas Liliequist

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© 2015 Anna Foka and Jonas Liliequist

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Foka, A. (2015). Gender Subversion and the Early Christian East: Reconstructing the Byzantine Comic Mime. In: Foka, A., Liliequist, J. (eds) Laughter, Humor, and the (Un)Making of Gender. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137463654_5

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