[quote=@Dinh AaronMk]
<Snipped quote by gaudi>

Sailing From Byzantium: How to a declining Empire changed the world (or something like that).

It's by Colin Welles (I think his name is). For most of it he writes the history of the movement of Greek philosophers from the perspective of the rationalist, ancient schools of philosophy like Platonism and Aristotlism and how they sorta-persisted in the Empire and then what happened when it went abroad. Towards the end when it gets to analyzing Russia the mystical sects of Hesychasm take center stage because it well... It sort of has to then.

And on the while it runs over the waxes and wanes of old-school philosophy in the Empire against the forces of religious conservativism as the Empire ebbs and flows on the brink of collapse and how that inspired the migration of the old philosophical schools to Italy to boot up Humanism and found the root of the Italian Renaissance.
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Oh, awesome! That goes along really well with what I'm studying - and I've never heard of some of those sects. Your description sounds fantastic, thank you.