Incognito Rhōmania

We are almost a month into the fall semester and things have been busy. Besides having to write a dissertation proposal, work on, or should I say catch up on three different research projects, and a baby (expected in the coming days), I am teaching HIST/DIGH3812 (Digital History) as a contract instructor/emergency hire. Needless to say, finding time to write has become even more of a chore. So, on this late Monday night, I am pondering the term 'incognito' and how to discuss who the Byzantines were for my class, but first, some context.

For the course, I decided to take a slightly different route and called it Digital Byzantium instead of Digital History. My objective was to introduce the students to digital tools used in Byzantine Studies and its many sub-fields of study (History, Archaeology, Public History, Numismatics, etc.) and how the digital is used to present and represent Byzantium to the public. However, this approach has a problem; when I asked in the semester's first class, "Who are the Byzantines?" three of my students knew—just three.

This is neither surprising nor a significant hurdle to overcome, as the course's primary goal is to understand how digital methods and theories are utilized in scholarly practice, regardless of whether it is Byzantine Studies, Classics, or modern historical analysis. So, next week, we begin our adventure into Byzantium. During our first two weeks, I had to discuss “Past” vs. “History” and explore how we define Digital History, Digital Archaeology, Digital Humanities, Digital Public History and Public Digital History. We did not come to any concrete definitions, nor whether each is an independent discipline in itself. I did this for two main reasons. One was to problematize these fields and then ask how these fields intersect with and contribute to Byzantine Studies in order to understand Byzantine society. After two weeks of methodology and theory, I think the class believes I am nuts.

Now, where does incognito fit into all of this and what is Incognito Rhōmania? It's Byzantium; rather, the surviving eastern half of the medieval Roman state in disguise. The question of incognito popped into my head as I had to access my Carleton accounts through Google's incognito browser. I started to consider what incognito implies. What does it mean to be placed in incognito? Then life happened, my mind drifted, and that was it until one day I was asked:

"Scott, how often do you think about the Roman Empire?"

I was slightly taken aback by this question, not because I was offended but because it was an odd question. So I responded with, "Yes. Of course, I do... It's my profession." We chuckled and stated that, obviously, I would think about the Romans. But do I think about the Romans? Or do I think about the Byzantines every day? You know, Romans in incognito.

I was told about some weird trend on TikTok where men were asked how many times a day, or something to that effect, they thought about Rome (I only saw one of these videos, and then I moved on to Dog TikToks). This led me to read an article by Sarah Bond and Stephanie Wong about what men think about when they think about the Roman Empire. What is their perception of Rome, or how do men understand what the Roman Empire was?

Lastly, I posted Bond and Wong's article on a discord channel to initiate some conversation about this topic. I don't know what type of conversation I would begin. Someone did respond: "I spent way too many years thinking about rome (sic)." To which I replied, "Pretty sure it’s part of my job description. Actually, I study “incognito Rome.”" It flowed as naturally as a Roman Aqueduct. Indeed, I study Rhōmania, whose identity was altered and placed into incognito mode. Byzantine is a false identity that scholars have assumed for this medieval society in order to conceal its true identity. But why?

In the past couple of years, scholars have addressed how and where the label Byzantium/Byzantine Empire evolved from and why it stuck. In the 19th century, within the cannons of Historical discourse, the medieval Roman state/empire/republic (all debatable) was placed into incognito mode. Byzantium was adopted and canonized and continues to be upheld to this day.

Byzantine Studies is a framework to explore a period in time that we know was Roman, but we keep it concealed. We whisper that they were Romans to ourselves, but publicly, it is Byzantium, the Byzantines, the Byzantine Empire. It's like having that awkward conversation with your teenage kids about sex. We want to address it. We need to address it, but we make up some weird, embarrassing, fabricated story that avoids the direct approach so we don't have to say the actual words to discuss what it is.

Thus, as scholars, we open up our disciplinary browser, click on incognito mode, and continue on our merry way as if such frameworks do not have implications for the modern world. I have no doubt that most of us "Byzantinists" would recognize that continuing to use incognito mode affects how we study the past and how we portray the past through history to the Public.

YOU!

Averil Cameron has recently written that Byzantine Studies is a field that is ripe for disruption (which is the title of her chapter), and "if Byzantine culture, Byzantine history, and Byzantine studies are not to remain a backwater, they cry out for new kinds of scrutiny...Byzantine studies will be resistant. But such rethinking is overdue" (Cameron 2023: 96). I do not disagree, but I want us to take it a step further. Our dependence on Byzantium is Incognito Rhōmania and hinders our field. Byzantine reeks of colonial and orientalist historiography.

We need to stop using incognito mode. Not just disrupt it.

Stop calling it Byzantine, as Leonora Neville has argued in talks (See: Is it Time to De-Colonize the Terms "Byzantine" and "Byzantium?" and Is it time to abandon the rubric “Byzantium”? with Leonora Neville.) Indeed, Leonora is one of the most outspoken critics of using Byzantine as an identifier for the medieval (eastern?) Roman state. In some benign protests, some scholars have asked what we should use in Byzantium's place. Simple. Let's use the regular browser, Rhōmania. This is easier said than done. And yes, the internet trolls will be upset and lash out when we finally abandon the rubric of the Byzantine Empire. Change is never easy and is always contested. However, I will begin calling the Byzantine Empire "Incognito Rhōmania" from now on. It may help shed some light on a complex topic, "ripe for disruption."

It is more accurate than Byzantine...right?