Marc D. Lauxtermann, Byzantine Poetry from Pisides to Geometres: Texts and Contexts. Volume Two. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2019. Pp. 431.

Abstract

It is with great pleasure, and a certain amount of relief, that one welcomes the appearance of the second volume of Marc Lauxtermann’s masterly study of the Byzantine poetry written between the seventh and tenth centuries: relief because the first volume appeared quite some time ago, in 2003 with its follow-up promised for 2006 (by which time life – as L puts it – had intervened), and pleasure because this second instalment lives up to the insights of the first. It must be stressed, however, that the two volumes were devised as a unit from the outset and that practicalities of size had led to the split. So the rationale behind this second volume must be sought in the first. Here L’s reasoning is set out in the three chapters that make up the first Part of the three that form the complete work: Parts One (Texts and Contexts) and Two (Epigrams in Context) are in vol. 1 and Part Three (Poems in Context) in vol. 2. L’s intentions are to examine all Byzantine poetry composed within his chosen period, apart from hymnography which makes specialist musical demands on commentators. His starting and ending points are confessedly arbitrary but delimit an ill-examined period that comes before an era of great poets, such as Mauropous, Christopher Mytilenaios or Theodore Prodromos, and the more studied Komnenian and Palaiologan ages. L covers poetry written in Greek both in Constantinople and beyond the city (e.g. in Sicily and South Italy) but excludes anything using the vernacular (admittedly scanty in these centuries). The modern reader, L argues, has to accept that Byzantine poetry works by rules unfamiliar to today’s audiences; but, if discussion of texts operates with due consideration for the historical context from which they emerge, the results can be productive: a modern reader has a much better chance of understanding what a medieval author was getting at if that reader has a sense of what rules are being respected or subverted: ‘Grammar, vocabulary, metrics and genre are just tools’ which open up Byzantine literary productions for further exploration.