History of Byzantine Literature by Panagiotis Agapitos
About the latest developments on my project of writing a history of Byzantine literature. The pro... more About the latest developments on my project of writing a history of Byzantine literature. The project has found an enthusiastic publisher!
When scholars are forced to speak about Medieval or Byzantine Greek it is not without a certain e... more When scholars are forced to speak about Medieval or Byzantine Greek it is not without a certain embarrassment. Conventionally, in various European languages (except those of contemporary Greece and Cyprus) 'Greek' means the language spoken and written since the time of the Homeric epics down to the end of antiquity around the fourth to fifth century CE, in other words, Ancient Greek. At the same time, 'Modern Greek' signifies the language used by Greek-speaking people today and at least since the seventeenth century. But what lies between these two forms of Greek? A very recent and important publication presents a voluminous grammar of 'Medieval and Early Modern Greek'; however, it is not made clear what linguistic idiom the two terms encompass. Similarly, a massive dictionary of 'Medieval Greek vernacular literature' does not offer a clear definition of this term. The dictionary and the grammar cover roughly the period -. Users realize fairly quickly that the language studied in these two works represents the early history of Modern Greek as a language independent of Ancient Greek and called 'vernacular' in English. At the same time, another recently completed dictionary is devoted to Byzantine Greek, wherein the learned (or archaizing) language from the eighth to the thirteenth century is analysed. The fact that Greek during Byzantine times appears to be strictly divided into a learned and a vernacular idiom is an old construct going back to Italian and German humanists of the sixteenth century, which was eagerly picked up by Greek intellectuals of the Enlightenment, who were making an effort to create a written idiom appropriate for the new nation that should arise out of the struggle for independence from Ottoman dominion. It is in this context that a beginning was sought for Modern Greek, and the beginning was determined by the discovery of various texts in the vernacular idiom. Some of these texts could be securely dated to the twelfth century; others could not but were nevertheless placed in that century, a constitutive period for the rise of vernacular literatures among
This is the first volume to explore the commentaries on ancient texts produced and circulating in... more This is the first volume to explore the commentaries on ancient texts produced and circulating in Byzantium. It adopts a broad chronological perspective (from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries) and examines different types of commentaries on ancient poetry and prose within the context of the study and teaching of grammar, rhetoric, philosophy and science. By discussing the exegetical literature of the Byzantines as embedded in the sociocultural context of the Komnenian and Palaiologan periods, the book analyses the frameworks and networks of knowledge transfer, patronage and identity building that motivated the Byzantine engagement with the ancient intellectual and literary tradition.
The essay offers a comprehensive synthesis of literature and education in Laskarid Nicaea with th... more The essay offers a comprehensive synthesis of literature and education in Laskarid Nicaea with the aim to represent and explain the textual production of the period 1204- 1261 in relation to its historical and socio-cultural environment. The essay thus explores the literary aesthetics of the mentioned production in relation to its primary audience, al- so considering the role this production had between the so-called Komnenian Renais- sance and Early Palaiologan Revival. Nine sections cover topics such as the mobility of people and ideas, education and manuscripts, the re-discovery of romance, courtly ro- mance and imperial power, exchanges of literary works, the emperor and his image, liter- ary style, experimentation in genre, the legacy of Nicaea. It will be shown that Komneni- an literature does not end abruptly in 1204, nor does Palaiologan literature restart in a vacuum after 1261, and that Nicaean literature is not a heap of disparate texts, but a dy- namic textual production supported by an innovative, even if small, education system. To a certain extent, this essay is a first attempt showing what a chapter of a narrative history of Byzantine literature could look like.
The present paper proposes a new periodization model for the history of Byzantine literature betw... more The present paper proposes a new periodization model for the history of Byzantine literature between the 11th and the 15th century. The paper examines first the use of the historical model in the periodization schemata of various overviews of Byzantine literature along with the essentialist and teleological concepts inherent in this model. Two further sections present the arguments concerning the insignificance of 1204 and 1453 for a literary history of Byzantium because both dates did not leave a visible imprint on the way people wrote after the disasters had occured, while their presence as historical markers of an abrupt end obscures the continuities and the important changes that took place around them. In two last sections the paper offers two new boundaries that are not instantaneous moments in history but fluid and broad segments of time in its unbroken stream. The years around 1050 and 1350 are marked by a series of changes in the way logoi were perceived both in school and in actual practice, and it is, therefore, proposed that Byzantine literature from the eleventh century onwards is shaped by two fluid periods: 1050-1350 and 1350-1500.
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History of Byzantine Literature by Panagiotis Agapitos