Barbara Crostini

Docent in Greek, Uppsala University

Barbara Crostini’s background is in Classics, with a BA from the University of Oxford, followed
by a doctorate in Modern History in 1999. For her dissertation, she moved into the field of Byzantine
Studies, investigating a liturgical homiliary composed by a monastic founder at Constantinople, Paul
of Evergetis (d. 1054). Since then, her primary research has concerned medieval Greek texts and
their physical carriers, and she has produced scholarly manuscript catalogues at the Bodleian Library
and at Trinity College Dublin, both in printed and in electronic format. She is currently involved in the
project of cataloguing all Greek manuscript collections in Sweden, funded by Riksbankens Jubileums-
fond (the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences). She was a researcher at Stockholm
University in the Ars edendi programme (2010–15), during which she carried out a project for an online
annotated edition of a Greek Psalter manuscript with illuminations.

At SCAS, Crostini will be writing the first draft of a monograph on the relationship between Byzantium
and Rome in the eleventh century, at the time of the 1054 schism. She wishes to use evidence from
manuscripts to recontextualize some of the fundamental issues that determined the progressive differen-
tiation between Greek and Latin churches, in particular their respective attitude to devotion to images
and the Eucharist, the role of monasteries in promoting cultural exchanges, and the use of texts and
patristic authorities to weave a common ‘textual community’ in which further communication could
take place. The provisional title of the monograph is ‘Undoing the Schism: Byzantium and the Spirit of
the “Gregorian Reform”, ca. 1040–1071’.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2016-17.