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The late Byzantine period (thirteenth to fifteenth centuries) was marked by both cultural fecundity and political fragmentation, resulting in an astonishingly multifaceted literary output. This book addresses the poetry of the empire’s final quarter-millennium from a broad perspective, bringing together studies on texts originating in places from Crete to Constantinople and from court to school, treating topics from humanist antiquarianism to pious self-help, and written in styles from the vernacular to Homeric language. It thus offers a reference work to a much-neglected but rich textual material that is as varied as it was potent in the sociocultural contexts of its times. Contributors are Theodora Antonopoulou, Marina Bazzani, Julián Bértola, Martin Hinterberger, Krystina Kubina, Marc D. Lauxtermann, Florin Leonte, Ugo Mondini, Brendan Osswald, Giulia M. Paoletti, Cosimo Paravano, Daniil Pleshak, Alberto Ravani, and Federica Scognamiglio.
This book offers the first complete overview of Byzantine poetry from the 4th to the 15th century. By bringing together 22 scholars, it explores the development of poetic trends and the interaction between poetry and society throughout the Byzantine millennium; it addresses a wide range of issues concerning the writing and reading of poetry (such as style, language, metrics, function, and circulation); and it surveys a large number of texts by looking closely at their place within the social and cultural milieus of their authors. Overall, the volume aims to enhance our understanding of Byzantine poetry and shed light on its important place in Byzantine literary culture. Contributors are Eirini Afentoulidou, Gianfranco Agosti, Roderick Beaton, Floris Bernard, Carolina Cupane, Kristoffel Demoen, Ivan Drpic, Jürgen Fuchsbauer, Antonia Giannouli, Martin Hinterberger, Wolfram Hörandner, Elizabeth Jeffreys, Michael Jeffreys, Marc Lauxtermann, Ingela Nilsson, Emilie van Opstall, Andreas Rhoby, Kurt Smolak, Foteini Spingou, Maria Tomadaki, Ioannis Vassis, Nikos Zagklas.
It is only in recent years that Byzantine poetry - a long-neglected aspect of Byzantine literature - has attracted the attention of philologists, literary and cultural historians. This holds true especially for the poetry written in middle and late Byzantium. Though many collections of poems are available in modern critical editions, a considerable amount of texts still remains completely unedited or accessible only in outdated and unreliable editions. Moreover, many works of this period have never been studied thoroughly with regard to their cultural impact on society. Issues of authorship and patronage, function, literary motives, generic qualities, and manuscripts still await further study. This volume aims to take a step to fill this gap. Although it includes studies on poetry from the early tenth to the fifteenth centuries, the main focus is placed on the Komnenian and Palaeologan times. It presents editions of completely unknown texts, such as a twelfth-century cycle of epigrams on John Klimax. It includes studies on various types of poetry, including didactic, occasional, and even poetry written for liturgical purposes. By analysing these works and placing them within their literary and socio-cultural context, we can draw conclusions about the cultural tastes of the Byzantines and acquire a more nuanced picture of middle and late Byzantine poetry.
This book explores the complex history of contact and exchange between Byzantium and the Latin West over a formative period of more than three hundred years, with a focus on the political, ecclesiastical and cultural spheres.
In the mid-eleventh century, secular Byzantine poetry attained a hitherto unseen degree of wit, vividness, and personal involvement, chiefly exemplified in the poetry of Christophoros Mitylenaios, Ioannes Mauropous, and Michael Psellos. This is the first volume to consider this poetic activity as a whole, critically reconsidering modern assumptions about Byzantine poetry, and focusing on Byzantine conceptions of the role of poetry in society. By providing a detailed account of the various media through which poetry was presented to its readers, and by tracing the initial circulation of poems, this volume takes an interest in the Byzantine reader and his/her reading habits and strategies, allowing aspects of performance and visual representation, rarely addressed, to come to the fore. It also examines the social interests that motivated the composition of poetry, establishing a connection with the extraordinary social mobility of the time. Self-representative strategies are analyzed against the background of an unstable elite struggling to find moral justification, which allows the study to raise the question of patronage, examine the discourse used by poets to secure material rewards, and explain the social dynamics of dedicatory epigrams. Finally, gift exchange is explored as a medium that underlines the value of poetry and confirms the exclusive nature of intellectual friendship.
Homer the Rhetorician is the first monograph study devoted to the monumental Commentary on the Iliad by Eustathios of Thessalonike, one of the most renowned orators and teachers of the Byzantine twelfth century. Homeric poetry was a fixture in the Byzantine educational curriculum and enjoyed special popularity under the Komnenian emperors. For Eustathios, Homer was the supreme paradigm of eloquence and wisdom. Writing for an audience of aspiring or practising prose writers, he explains in his commentary what it is that makes Homer's composition so successful in rhetorical terms. This study explores the exemplary qualities that Eustathios recognizes in the poet as author and the Iliad as rhetorical masterpiece. In this way, it advances our understanding of the rhetorical thought of a leading intellectual and the role of a cultural authority as respected as Homer in one of the most fertile periods in Byzantine literary history.
The twelfth century was one of the most fertile periods in Byzantine literary history and this volume is the first to focus exclusively on its abundant poetic production. It explores the broader sociocultural tendencies that shaped twelfth-century literature in both prose and verse by examining the school as an important venue for the composition and use of texts written in verse, by shedding new light on the relationship between poetry, patronage and power, and by offering the first editions and interpretive studies of hitherto neglected works. In this way, it enhances our knowledge of the history of Byzantine literature and enables us to situate Medieval Greek poetry in the broader literary world of the medieval Mediterranean.
In this volume Anthi Andronikou explores the social, cultural, religious and trade encounters between Italy and Cyprus during the late Middle Ages, from ca. 1200 -1400, and situates them within several Mediterranean contexts. Revealing the complex artistic exchange between the two regions for the first time, she probes the rich but neglected cultural interaction through comparison of the intriguing thirteenth-century wall paintings in rock-cut churches of Apulia and Basilicata, the puzzling panels of the Madonna della Madia and the Madonna di Andria, and painted chapels in Cyprus, Lebanon, and Syria. Andronikou also investigates fourteenth-century cross-currents that have not been adequately studied, notably the cult of Saint Aquinas in Cyprus, Crusader propaganda in Santa Maria Novella in Florence, and a unique series of icons crafted by Venetian painters working in Cyprus. Offering new insights into Italian and Byzantine visual cultures, her book contributes to a broader understanding of cultural production and worldviews of the medieval Mediterranean.
This volume explores various forms, functions and meanings of satirical texts written in the Middle Byzantine period.
This volume, the first ever of its kind in English, introduces and surveys Greek literature in Byzantium (330 - 1453 CE). In twenty-five chapters composed by leading specialists, The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Literature surveys the immense body of Greek literature produced from the fourth to the fifteenth century CE and advances a nuanced understanding of what "literature" was in Byzantium. This volume is structured in four sections. The first, "Materials, Norms, Codes," presents basic structures for understanding the history of Byzantine literature like language, manuscript book culture, theories of literature, and systems of textual memory. The second, "Forms," deals with the how Byzantine literature works: oral discourse and "text"; storytelling; rhetoric; re-writing; verse; and song. The third section ("Agents") focuses on the creators of Byzantine literature, both its producers and its recipients. The final section, entitled "Translation, Transmission, Edition," surveys the three main ways by which we access Byzantine Greek literature today: translations into other Byzantine languages during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages; Byzantine and post-Byzantine manuscripts; and modern printed editions. The volume concludes with an essay that offers a view of the recent past--as well as the likely future--of Byzantine literary studies.