Nancy Patterson Sevcenko ’56
Alice-Mary Maffry Talbot ’56
 It all began in 1953, in a Chapin classroom, where four members of the Class of 1956 studied ancient Greek with the beloved, if formidable, Nesta Lloyd-Thomas, who taught classics at the school for 37 years. All four students would later pay tribute to Miss Lloyd-Thomas for her first-rate teaching, and two of them, Nancy Patterson Sevcenko and Alice-Mary Maffry Talbot, would credit her with inspiring them to become scholars of Byzantium, the most powerful state in the Eastern Mediterranean for 1100 years, renowned for its art and architecture.
After graduating from college with highest honors — Dr. Talbot with a bachelor of arts in classics from Radcliffe and Dr. Sevcenko with a degree in art history from Smith — they spent a transformational year together at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. It was there that they mastered modern Greek and enjoyed excursions in Dr. Sevcenko’s Volkswagen Beetle through the stark, mountainous landscape to which they would remain passionately attached. Together they visited monasteries, seemingly suspended in air, and the castles and churches of medieval Greece. As a result of their explorations, Dr. Sevcenko resolved that she would focus on the Byzantine period that included the Middle Ages, and Dr. Talbot decided to pursue a new-found interest in the post-classical history of Greece.
 Upon their return to New York, both entered graduate school at Columbia. Dr. Sevcenko studied “the art of medieval Greece, that is the art of Byzantium,” writing her dissertation on the life of Saint Nicholas in Byzantine art, and Dr. Talbot earned her doctorate in Byzantine history. During this period, the friends forged a still closer connection when Nancy Patterson married Ihor Sevcenko, one of her professors, who was also Dr. Talbot’s mentor.
As Byzantinists, the two women have been writers, teachers, administrators and independent scholars of distinction, but among their most meaningful professional activities are those they have done together. They have both held leadership positions with the Byzantine Studies Conference, the United States National Committee for Byzantine Studies and the Medieval Academy of America, and their greatest mutual achievement is undoubtedly The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, winner of two awards.
With Dr. Talbot and Dr. Sevcenko as contributors as well as editors, executive and associate respectively, the dictionary, spanning three volumes, contains 5,000 entries written by scholars from 18 nations. It covers topics such as Byzantine bathing habits, emotions (laughter was bad; tears an indication of a sympathetic nature) and diet. Readers discover in the dictionary, for example, that the saints, who were central figures in the Byzantine world, survived on “water and beans or wild plants and berries” while “the lords and ladies of Byzantium,” in Yeats’ phrase, dined on caviar and sturgeon, various sauces and honey cakes.
The women compiled the dictionary at Dumbarton Oaks, a well-known center for Byzantine studies in Washington, D.C., where Dr. Talbot will remain as director until July 2008. As one would expect, her career as a Byzantinist will continue. “In the immediate future, I will focus on the completion of various editions and translations of saints’ lives,” she said. No doubt she will also revisit, one day, the three most wondrous places she has ever seen: “the summit of Mt. Sinai, Petra in Jordan and the Meteora monasteries in Greece.”
Dr. Sevcenko, who has written about “the lives of the saints, art and liturgy and illuminated manuscripts,” would like to broaden her scope of work. Expanding beyond her love of mountains, especially those in the Peloponnese, and her knowledge of animals and images of landscape in Byzantine art, she hopes to do more research on the theme of the environment. “First one needs to master the theoretical approaches to this theme that have developed in the present-day environmental sciences,” she said, “and that is a huge area to tackle. In the meantime, though, one can always explore small themes. I have just finished one on the giraffe in Byzantium as a form of public spectacle!”
Upon her retirement from Chapin in 1966, the former teacher of these two academics, Miss Lloyd-Thomas, wrote a missive for the school’s Alumnae Bulletin, and her words seem to apply to Dr. Sevcenko and Dr. Talbot, scholars and friends for life: “Chapin, now as in the past,” she wrote, “bears witness that education does not consist only in promoting academic standards and college admissions but also in fostering the love of learning and the mutual affection that engender largeness of mind and warmth of heart.”
Last updated 11.30.07
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