Fifth Open Letter

Panagiotis Agapitos FIFTH OPEN LETTER TO THE READERS OF MY ‘ACADEMIA.EDU’ PAGE Dear readers, in four previous open letters I informed you about a series of publications that I have started uploading on my academia.edu page, as preliminary studies towards the writing of a history of Byzantine literature (see Open Letter, Second Open Letter and Third Letter). In the meantime, these papers have grown to 18, though two of the ones in the previous open letter were never finished due to the corona virus conditions. The revised list of the papers is as follows: 1. ‘Contesting conceptual boundaries: Byzantine literature and its history,’ Interfaces—A Journal of Medieval European Literatures 1 (2015) 62–91. [See the site http://riviste.unimi.it/interfaces/index, for the open access publication of this new journal from where the complete volume can be downloaded as a pdf file.] 2. ‘Late Antique or Early Byzantine? The shifting beginnings of Byzantine literature,’ Istituto Lombardo–Accademia di Scienze e Lettere. Rendiconti: Classe di Lettere e Scienze Morali e Storiche 146 (2012 [2015]) 3–38. 3. ‘The insignificance of 1204 and 1453 for the history of Byzantine literature,’ Medioevo Greco 20 (2020) 1–58. 4. ‘The periodization of Byzantine literature: From a historical to a literary Model,’ in: I. Grimm-Stadelmann et alii (eds.), Anekdota Byzantina. Studies for Albrecht Berger on his 65th Birthday, Berlin–Boston 2023, 1–20. 5. ‘Grammar, genre and patronage in the twelfth century: redefining a scientific paradigm in the history of Byzantine literature,’ Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik 64 (2014) 1–22. 6. ‘Learning to read and write a schedos: the verse dictionary of Par. gr. 400,’ in: P. Odorico and S. Efthymiadis and I. D. Polemis (eds.), “Pour une poètique de Byzance”: Hommage à Vassilis Katsaros [Dossiers Byzantins 16], Paris 2015, pp. 11–24. 7. ‘Anna Komnene and the politics of schedographic training and colloquial discourse”, Νέα ῾Ρώμη / Nea Rhome 10 (2013 [2014]) 89–107. 8. ‘Literary haute cuisine and its dangers: Eustathios of Thessalonike on schedography and everyday language,’ Dumbarton Oaks Papers 69 (2015) 225– 241. 9. ‘New genres in the twelfth century: the schedourgia of Theodore Prodromos,’ Medioevo Greco 15 (2015) 1–41. 10. ‘John Tzetzes and the blemish examiners: a Byzantine grammarian on schedography, everyday language and writerly disposition,’ Medioevo Greco 17 (2017) 1–57. 11. ‘Greek’, in: M. Chinka – C. Young (eds.), Literary Beginnings in the European Middle Ages, Cambridge 2022, pp. 255–275. 12. ‘Karl Krumbacher and the history of Byzantine literature,’ Byzantinische Zeitschrift 108 (2015) 1–52. 13. ‘Franz Dölger and the hieratic model of Byzantine literature,’ Byzantinische Zeitschrift 112 (2019) 707–779 and six colour plates. 14. ‘Dangerous literary liaisons: Byzantium and Neohellenism,’ Byzantina 35 (2017 [2018]) 33–126. 15. Literature and education in Nicaea and their legacy: An interpretive synthesis, Medioevo Greco 21 (2021) 1–37. 16. The politics and practices of commentary in Komnenian Byzantium, in: B. van den Berg – D. Manolova – P. Marciniak (eds.), Byzantine Commentaries on Ancient Greek Texts: 12th – 15th Centuries, Cambridge 2022, pp. 41–60. 17. ‘These Devices are the Writer’s Own Technique’: Eustathios of Thessalonike and the Redefinition of Rhetorical Genres, in: L. Silvano – A. M. Taragna (eds.), Studies in Honour of Enrico Maltese, Ghent 2023, 1–32. [32 p.] 18. ‘The force of discourses’: Literary production in the Komnenian era, in B. van den Berg – N. Zagklas (eds.), Byzantine Poetry in the Long Twelfth Century, 1081-1204, Cambridge 2024 –— forthcoming. Papers nos. 12-14 deal with the history of Byzantine Studies and, more specifically, with the history of Byzantine Philology, the writing of Karl Krumbacher’s Geschichte der byzantinischen Litteratur, the role of Franz Dölger (1891-1968) in shaping the image of Byzantine literature in the pre- and post-WWII era and in demoting Byzantine Philology into an ‘auxiliary discipline,’ and the crucial issue of how the beginnings of Modern Greek literature were gradually defined since the middle of the 19th century. I would like to point out that around Christmas paper no. 13 on Franz Dölger will appear in a revised and expanded version in Greek as a book that will invlude rare photographic material from the Nazi archives and most of the photos depicting everyday life on Mount Athos in July 1941 as they had been published in that rarest of albums—Dölger’s Möchsland Athos of 1943. Related to the beginnings of Modern Greek literature are papers nos. 5–11 that discuss the relation of the so-called learned to the so-called vernacular (Medieval Greek) language and literature in the 12th century, a time when the first longer texts in the ‘vernacular idiom’ were composed. Paper no. 5 offers a broad overview of the whole issue, introducing what I have termed the ‘Krumbacher paradigm,’ papers nos. 7– 10 analyze in detail the opinions of four 12th-century authors, paper no. 6 presents a “peculiar” dictionary of the late 12 century, while paper no. 11 offers a presentation of how we could meaningfully situate the production of vernacular texts initially inside and later outside Byzantine literature. Finally, papers nos. 1–4 discuss the important issue of the periodization of Byzantine literature by proposing a periodization based on a literary rather than the conventional historical model used so far. More specifically, paper no.1 takes a broader view of the various conceptual boundaries that obstruct a holistic approach to Byzantine literature, while paper no. 2 proposes to start a new history of Byzantine literature with two major authors of the early fourth century (Eusebios of Caesarea and Firmianus Lactantius). Paper 3 offers a critique of the conventional boundaries used for parts of the so-called Middle Byzantine and the Late Byzantine periods. Paper 4 examines the whole issue and proposes a series of radically different periods with boundaries related to textual and socio-cultural realities rather than ‘significant historical dates.’ Papers 15–18 offer glimpses of how the new history of Byzantine literature will look like, where a number of issues are discussed and looked at from new angles, in particular the issue of genre. What is most important, however, is the fact that after an extended process of proposal and evaluation supported by a Gutenberg fellowship at the section of Byzantine Studies fo the Universoty of Mainz, Cambridge University Press has offered me a contract to publish: Byzantine Literature, AD 300–1500: A Narrative History The contract has been signed two weeks ago and the work has already started. I am very grateful for all the help I have received over the past fourteen years since I conceived of a very early form of the book at Stanford University. With best to evryone for the coming autumn and in hope that peace will prevail upon this world of ours!