ABSTRACT
The depiction of monasticism in an eleventh-century illuminated copy of the extraordinarily popular story of Barlaam and Joasaph will raise the question of how the monastic movement was understood. Unlike the eastern pair of royal figures in the Barlaam and Joasaph narrative, emperors in Byzantium were unquestionably placed within the same set of Christian beliefs as the monks. The importance of monasticism throughout the Christian oikoumene of the Middle Ages is widely acknowledged. Its importance is especially manifest in the east, as the direct inheritor of the foundations that defined and embodied the monastic spirit from its origins in Egypt and Palestine. Michael Psellos was a sophisticated aesthete who could not have taken issue with artistic achievements that saw the cooperation between wealthy patrons and monastic institutions, producing monuments such as, for example, the mosaics of Nea Mone on Chios.
