Orality and Textuality (With an Appendix on the Byzantine Conceptions)

Abstract

The chapter proposes that one cannot approach Byzantine literature—preserved in either medieval and early modern manuscript books or in the form of inscriptions—without an appreciation of its textual modes of production and circulation, its possible origins in oral creation, and its likely orientation toward oral performance and auditory reception. It thus introduces and surveys three types of texts: (i) texts that reflect conditions of primary orality (songs, sayings, and short or long “stories”); (ii) texts that entail secondary orality (primarily rhetorical and liturgical texts); and (iii) a middle type of texts (texts of fictive orality and rhetoricized liturgical literature). The chapter is rounded off by an examination of Byzantine conceptions of oral vs. written discourse.