This book examines the many ways Byzantines lived with their trees. It takes seriously theological and hagiographic tree involvement as expressions of that culture’s deep engagement—and even fascination—with the arboreal. These pages tap into the current attention paid to plants in a wide range of scholarship, an attention that involves the philosophy of plant life as well as scientific discoveries of how communicative trees may be, and how they defend themselves. Reading writings on trees from Late Antiquity and medieval Byzantium sympathetically, the book argues for an arboreal imagination at the root of human aspirations to know and draw close to the divine. weiterlesen