ABSTRACT

Textual scholars looks at reception theory or reader-response criticism, art historians addresses 'the viewer's part' or phenomenology, this chapter makes to think about sensory perception, and to engage with the affective and emotive aspects of life in Byzantium. In the twelfth-century images of the ascension in the Kokkinobaphos manuscripts, the dramatis personae, the heavenly beings, have stepped out of the frame and, along with the prophets, appear to experience on earth that beauty. The account in Michael Psellos' Chronographia of the embassy to Isaac I Komnenos and the transition to power is seen entirely in terms of Psellos and his fellow ambassadors entering tents. The chapter describes a riddle recorded in several middle Byzantine collections, which s best known from Christopher of Mytilene. Functionally tents appear in three Byzantine contexts: military, hunting and ceremonial.