Demetrius Loufas (Stanford, History)

“Not so Bad as They Deserve”: The Lowly Image of the Greek in Late Medieval Europe

Abstract for the talk: 

Among its many glories, the Renaissance gave new life to at least one old grudge.  Political conflicts and religious schism had steadily degraded western perceptions of the Greeks for nearly the entire medieval period; the passion for ancient, often Greek, texts that gripped Western Europe from the fourteenth century onwards did little to redeem the already low status of the Greek in the Early Modern mind.  Instead, the newly recovered and revered words of the ancients served better to inspire and reinforce disdain for the Greeks than to relieve it. 
This talk—and the dissertation chapter upon which it is based—explores the nature of western European attitudes towards the Greeks of Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe.  Crusaders, the greatest humanists, popes, and playwrights all had their say on what was a surprisingly popular theme of the period—what exactly is wrong with the Greeks?  By exploring their observations, I intend to detail the experiences of an increasingly large Greek population in Venice—and the anxieties of the society in which they settled.