Byzantium and America on the Cusp of Modernity.

• Author: Quest, Linda

Eleni Kefala. The Conquered: Byzantium and America on the Cusp of Modernity. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, 2020. xiii+158. Hardcover $25.00.

Serendipity and ambiguity are like bookends to this gem of a volume. It opens with Eleni Kefala's stay at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection for Byzantine and Pre-Columbian America studies. Scholars in those specialties congregate there, interact, share their enthusiasms. It closes with the author's 2016 attempt in Mexico to locate a Spanish translation of Cantares mexicanos, a primary source for present-day readers and students to get to know the tragedy of the fall of Tenochtitlan (1512). The fruitlessness of her search shows how unreasonable it would be for the rest of us to independently trace the results of scholars like Kefala. Verification would depend on accessing rare collections such as Dumbarton Oaks and knowing how to use them. Comparatively, the tragedy of the siege and sack of Constantinople (1422, 1204) is kept alive today through Anakalema in Greek and Cypriot mass-market anthologies and textbooks. Who would expect The Conquered to come to stay on a political scientist's book shelves? It has, and it belongs for the enigmas it poses.

The Conquered fits in among political and social sciences. It employs analytical tools and techniques with which we can check. Analogically, they authenticate Kefala's scholarship. "Cultural trauma and collective memory" processes are used to compare human lamentations, for inhabitants and later generations, over conquests of Constantinople and Tenochtitlan. Especially refreshing is use of Neil J. Smelser's work on Collective Behavior, a robust and elegant methodology for tracking shifts of generalizations from negative to positive, and of near victories to short-circuits. Kefala illuminates how short-circuiting trauma and memory tends to weaken collective movements, whereas poetry, song, and art can be seen to energize carrier groups.

Collective activity involves what Kefala depicts as "day to day" and "down to earth" songs and verses told and retold in private lives of citizens. These persons were not direct sufferers of pillage and horror from being conquered and of seeing their civilization looted and wrecked. Nonetheless, they empathized and felt vicariously the agonies and losses of their forebearers who had been victims. The songs and poems communicated this retrospectively with idioms, standard speech...