The Proprietary Church and Monastery in Byzantium and the Eastern Christian World

Though long known to specialists on Byzantine monasticism, the existence of proprietary religious institutions in Byzantium has attracted little attention from scholars who study their analogs in the medieval West (Eigenkirchen and -klöster). Contrary to some periodizations as well as general overviews of the subject, proprietary churches and monasteries constitute a diachronic feature of the organization of Byzantine and indeed Eastern Christian religious institutions and, unlike in in the medieval West, never disappeared or were attenuated by a “founder’s right” (ius patronatus). Rather, they existed diachronically alongside endowed religious institutions. Their prominence in Byzantine and post-Byzantine history has major implications for cross-cultural comparisons of Byzantine religious institutions with studies of their counterparts in the medieval West and elsewhere, which are often predicated on inaccurate or outdated interpretations of the origin and development of Byzantine religious institutions.