Readers and Their Pleasures

Abstract

The chapter explores the ways in which the high value of reading and, especially, its association with various kinds of pleasure were constructed and conceived in Byzantium. More specifically, it examines what the effect of reading was, how its experience was perceived, and who was conceived as the ideal reader. It also explores the social profile of readers in Byzantium, and demarcates two main types of readers from the perspective of the typology of ideal discourse: the “ritual” and the “aesthetic” reader, the former predicated on the likely existential transformation enacted by reading, and the latter focused on the materiality and sensuality of reading. In relation to the aesthetics of reading, the chapter also examines the public recitation of texts in Byzantium as well as Byzantine “book art” (both the illustration and the decoration of manuscripts).