Acknowledgments
This volume stems from two sessions organized at the 44th Byzantine Studies Conference (4–7 October 2018; San Antonio, Texas) and titled “North of Byzantium: Art and Architecture at the Crossroads of the Latin, Greek, and Slavic Cultural Spheres, c.1300–c.1550 (I) and (II).” We are grateful to the audience members at the conference for the thoughtful comments, questions, and the lively discussion, and to the Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture for sponsoring the sessions and for making possible this project from beginning to end. We have also received individual and joint support, as well as generous financial assistance for the research, writing, and revising stages of this volume from the following institutions and organizations: The Index of Medieval Art at Princeton University, a Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Art from the American Council of Learned Societies, generously supported by the Getty Foundation, as well as the VolkswagenStiftung and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
In addition to the session speakers at the Byzantine Studies Conference, and in efforts to enrich the topics and issues under consideration, we invited other authors to contribute to this publication. We would like to thank all of the contributors for their enthusiasm toward this project, and for their hard work in bringing their individual essays to fruition. We also greatly appreciate the unfailing support from the staff and editors at Brill, and in particular Florin Curta and Dušan Zupka for accepting this volume for inclusion in the series East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 450–1450. A special thanks to the anonymous reviewer for the thorough comments and sound advice that helped improve the individual contributions and the volume as a whole. Finally, we are deeply indebted to our copyeditor, Joseph Hannan, for his invaluable assistance in helping us bring this project to completion and to our indexer, Sever J. Voicu, for his time and effort.
This edited volume is the first publication to arise from our joint initiative—North of Byzantium (NoB)—through which we aim to explore the rich history, art, and culture of the northern frontiers of the Byzantine Empire in Eastern Europe between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries. We are very grateful to all of the mentors, scholars, and friends who have greeted us with encouragement from the very beginning, and to the Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture for believing in this project and supporting it with an initial three-year grant.