This chapter tackles the question of laughter and humour from a theoretical perspective. Rather t... more This chapter tackles the question of laughter and humour from a theoretical perspective. Rather than map out the Byzantine ‘comic landscape’ by resorting to modern theorisations, it looks at Greek medieval humour and laughter from within, in the attempt to single out elements of a Byzantine theory of the comic. Recent scholarship has gone some way towards dismantling the prejudice that there was no room for laughter in Byzantine society, combing the sources for tangible evidence of humour and jokes, or focusing on the scant traces for the survival of genres such as mimes and satires. Less reflection has been devoted to understanding how the Byzantines construed, conceptualised and justified comic features of discourse. Patristic and devotional texts, frowning upon laughter and humour, have taken the lion’s share of attention. This chapter sheds light on the other side of the coin, concentrating on secular texts used for educational purposes in middle Byzantine literature (rhetorical...
yzantine studies have long parted ways with Classical philology, as the book under review abundan... more yzantine studies have long parted ways with Classical philology, as the book under review abundantly shows: its aim, as stated in the Editor’s stimulating introduction (3–18), is to investigate strategies of ‘authorial self-production’ in Greek high-brow literature from the ninth to the twelfth century CE, in terms of shape and construction of authorial personae, as well as in matters of legitimation, performance, and genre. Byzantine texts are thereby mostly considered in their medieval dimension rather than in their dialogue with the past, and occasionally compared with their coeval Latin counterparts—most notably in Ian Johnson’s insightful Nachwort (276–94), where the issue of authorship in Latin texts from Medieval England is taken into account. This is an interesting and promising approach; still, one may find it curious that throughout the volume virtually no hint is made to the long-standing popularity of similar questions in modern scholarship on ancient Greek literature (a...
This paper offers the first literary-historical analysis of the book epigram in hexameters sealin... more This paper offers the first literary-historical analysis of the book epigram in hexameters sealing the second recension of John Tzetzes' Historiai. The book epigram belongs to a corpus of paratexts that, despite being edited by Giovanni Pietro Leone half a century ago, have received barely any attention. And yet, as we argue, they are crucial to understand how Tzetzes positioned the Historiai within his oeuvre, offering at the same time striking insights into the intellectual scene of 12th-century Constantinople. The hexametric book epigram, in particular, provides a key to read through the generic and rhetorical conventions of the Historiai, allowing the readers to "crack" their code and stressing the importance of humor and irony to read through Tzetzes' own idiosyncratic expressive modules.
Taking its cue from the work of John Tzetzes (1110-1185 ca), this paper offers a preliminary surv... more Taking its cue from the work of John Tzetzes (1110-1185 ca), this paper offers a preliminary survey of the role played by bureaucratic and legal training in defining autography and authorship in 12th-century Byzantium. By comparing archival practices and authorial signatures, it demonstrates that features belonging to the legal discourse could be exploited by intellectuals to reinforce and re-center their voices as well as to overcome social constraints and, at time, marginality. The paper also takes a comparative perspective, by looking at the developments of vernacular poetry in Bologna, Tuscany and Sicily between 13th and 14th century, with a focus on the work of Francesco da Barberino. The comparative stance aims to prove that entanglements between legal/bureaucratic and literary writing are a cross-cultural constant emerging due to similar educational and scribal practices, thus showing that the case of the Italian pre-humanist intellectuals is the rule rather than the exception.
“A Hand of Ivory”: Moving Objects in Psellos’ Oration for his Daughter Styliane. A Case Study
Emotion Review
This paper takes its cue from the recent interest in materiality and “things” in the field of Byz... more This paper takes its cue from the recent interest in materiality and “things” in the field of Byzantine studies, to explore the role of objects in evoking being moved. First, it advances a new model to explain the relationship between being moved and affordances. Second, it focuses on a specific case study, that is Michael Psellos’ funeral oration for his daughter Styliane (1054), who died of smallpox at the age of 9 years old. The paper sheds light on how affective affordances of an object contribute to the evocation of being moved in literary texts, working within and affecting narrative patterns. While building on the experience of ethical and spiritual principles clearly recognizable by the audience, such affordances point toward the activation of broader core values.
Martin Hose, Hg.: Synesios von Kyrene. Ägyptische Erzählungen oder Über die Vorsehung
Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum / Journal of Ancient Christianity, 2015
The paper provides for the first time a full-fledged analysis of the structure and compositional ... more The paper provides for the first time a full-fledged analysis of the structure and compositional principles sustaining John Tzetzes' Chiliades or Historiai. The article is divided into three sections. The first focuses on the developments of commentary literature in late twelfth-century Byzantium, showing how exegesis is used to textualize the authorial self and create autobiographical narratives. The second delves into the purpose of the work and its audience. The final section, focusing on the first part of the work, explores the role of memory in the Historiai and in particular, the interplay between cultural memories and experience in Tzetzes' self-presentation.
Taking its cue from a biographical anecdote reported by Eustathios of Thessalonike in the introdu... more Taking its cue from a biographical anecdote reported by Eustathios of Thessalonike in the introduction to his Commentary on the Odyssey (Homer allegedly found the material for his poems in some book rolls penned by one Lady Phantasia), this paper investigates the entanglements between Eustathios’ exegetical work on Homer and the Byzantine re - vival of fiction in the XIIth century. The first section explores the way in which Eusta - thios presents Homer’s compositional practices, construed as akin to fictional narrative. 286 «MEG» 14, 2014 Abstracts The second section delves into the associations sparkled by mythical female authorial agents. Finally, in the third section, the paper shows how the story selected by Eustathios could easily evoke in the Byzantine reader images related to the writer’s activity and imaginative craftiness – the latter not devoid of risks.
Θάτερον δὲ ὁ θεὸς καὶ ἐπέταξε καὶ ἐνέκρινεν, ὃ τῇ φανταστικῇ φύσει χαριστήριον ἀνατέθειται. ἔσκεπ... more Θάτερον δὲ ὁ θεὸς καὶ ἐπέταξε καὶ ἐνέκρινεν, ὃ τῇ φανταστικῇ φύσει χαριστήριον ἀνατέθειται. ἔσκεπται δ'ἐν αὐτῷ περὶ τῆς εἰδωλικῆς ἁπάσης ψυχῆς, καὶ ἕτερ' ἄττα προκεχείρισται δόγματα τῶν οὔπω φιλοσοφηθέντων Ἕλλησι. καὶ τί ἄν τις ἀπομηκύνοι περὶ αὐτοῦ; 2 die andere [schrift] hat die Gottheit selbst sowohl in Auftrag gegeben als auch geprüft, und sie ist der naturkraft der Phantasie als dankesgabe geweiht. die untersuchung darin gilt dem ganzen bildmäßigen seelenteil, und auch bestimmte andere lehrsätze sind in ihr vorgetragen, die in der griechischen Philosophie noch niemand behandelt hat. Was soll man noch viel darüber sagen? 3 synesios von Kyrene: Politik -Literatur -Philosophie, herausgegeben von Helmunt seng und Lars m. Hoffmann, studies in Byzantine History and Civilization, 6 (Turnhout, 2013), pp. 247-275.
In the Greek novel dreams often function as mise en abyme of the narration, in that they foreshad... more In the Greek novel dreams often function as mise en abyme of the narration, in that they foreshadow events, as in Longus, reflect the circularity of narration, as in Chariton, are associated with omens or with the prophetic description of works of art, as in Achilles Tatius, or conceal enigmatic meanings, as in Xenophon Ephesius. The main characters' dreams often share an ambiguity with the novels themselves that puts the dreams halfway between truth and imagination. Not unlike literary creation (above all poetic), dreams are generated by the imaginative faculty of the mind (phantasia). As dreams fluctuate between onar and hypar, so novels oscillate between mythos and logos. In my paper, I want to argue that for ancient readers dreams were likely to share with novelistic narration a common 'phantastic' background, which fully accounts, along with literary tradition, for their pivotal narrative function.
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