Strangers to Themselves: The Byzantine Outsider

March 1998 saw Byzantinists gathering together at the University of Sussex in Brighton, for the annual symposium held by the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies. Their aim was to consider the question of the 'Byzantine outsider'. Some categories of outsiders appear clear and simple: those marked out by class, race, sex, religion. But these categories are not universals. Today, historians of all periods are examining the ways in which we analyse the divisions in our societies, which ca