Pub Date : 2021-07-15DOI: 10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780199351763.013.39
Stratis Papaioannou
The chapter introduces two sets of questions pertaining to (a) the social profile of Byzantine authors, and (b) the conception and value of authorship in Byzantium. It thus first surveys the prevalent patterns in the biographies of the c. 1600 eponymous known Greek authors from Byzantium. It then discusses the cultural as well as spiritual capital of authorship in Byzantium: notions such as those of divine inspiration and author-saints, and “practices” such pseudonymity (the false ascription of texts) and anonymity (the loss or absence of authorial signatures). The chapter concludes with an exploration of the reception of Symeon Metaphrastes (perhaps the most important author of the middle Byzantine period) as an author by later generations of readers.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-15DOI: 10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780199351763.013.37
Stratis Papaioannou
The chapter raises the question of what is “Byzantine literature” and introduces the contents of the Handbook. In the context of the volume, “Byzantine literature” refers to “Literature in Greek, during the Byzantine period (330 ce–1453 ce),” which, however, raises a series of problems. (1) While “literature,” for a modern audience, signifies primarily fiction and poetry, a wider understanding of the term is needed so as to appreciate the manifold textual and discursive culture of Byzantium as we can recover it from the thousands of manuscripts and inscriptions in which it has been preserved (relevant statistics are also offered). (2) While “Byzantine” has been conventionally used in order to focus on Greek literature (in the predominantly Greek-speaking “Byzantine” Empire), this should not make us forget that Greek was only one among many “Byzantine” languages (e.g., Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Georgian, and Arabic) and that the relation of the Greek tradition with the literary traditions in these other languages is fundamental for understanding Byzantine literature in its totality.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-15DOI: 10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780199351763.013.22
Carolina Cupane
This section surveys translations from contemporary European vernaculars, with a focus on literature in Frankish Greece, and texts such as the War of Troy, the Chronicle of Morea, and adaptations of western romances. The survey is introduced by a general discussion of translation in the Middle Ages—which allowed for many forms of adaptation, including expansion, abridgment, and the complete rewriting of a given model—and the socio-political contexts and contact zones in which such translation activity took place in Byzantium, the dominant culture being always the giver and the dominated the receiver.
{"title":"Neo-Latin Languages","authors":"Carolina Cupane","doi":"10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780199351763.013.22","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780199351763.013.22","url":null,"abstract":"This section surveys translations from contemporary European vernaculars, with a focus on literature in Frankish Greece, and texts such as the War of Troy, the Chronicle of Morea, and adaptations of western romances. The survey is introduced by a general discussion of translation in the Middle Ages—which allowed for many forms of adaptation, including expansion, abridgment, and the complete rewriting of a given model—and the socio-political contexts and contact zones in which such translation activity took place in Byzantium, the dominant culture being always the giver and the dominated the receiver.","PeriodicalId":260014,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Literature","volume":"37 24","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120822837","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-15DOI: 10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780199351763.013.27
Wolfram Hörandner, Andreas Rhoby
The chapter deals with Byzantine metrics and prose rhythm. Byzantine poets used various meters; from the seventh century onward, primarily the Byzantine dodecasyllable, i.e., a meter with a stable number of (12) syllables, which is based on the iambic trimeter of Antiquity and Late Antiquity and is read after the word accent. Various authors (such as Ioannes Geometres, Theodoros Prodromos, and Theodoros Metochites) also wrote hexameters (not only for special occasions), but this meter was less frequently used because for the Byzantine audience the distinction between short and long syllables was lost. The fifteen-syllable verse (or political verse) represents an independent Byzantine development, which, as a combination of hemistichs of eight and seven syllables, may have its origin in early hymnography. Rhythm is part of verse and prose. The prose rhythm, an elementary element of rhetoric, describes the tendency in Greek prose to end clauses in a rhythmically patterned way. The position most suitable for rhythmical regulation of a prose text is at the end of a clause or a period, as also pointed out by Byzantine theoreticians. The so-called Meyer’s law (after Wilhelm Meyer from Speyer) describes the system of placing at least two unstressed syllables between the last two accents of a clause. The character of Byzantine cadences has been very much under debate, and recently, editors have begun to take into account the punctuation practice in manuscripts in order to get a better view of the relationship between punctuation and rhythm.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-15DOI: 10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780199351763.013.40
Stratis Papaioannou
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).
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Pub Date : 2021-07-15DOI: 10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780199351763.013.6
Anthony Kaldellis
The reception of classical literature in Byzantium was a tense field, as ancient texts were socially and intellectually prestigious but religiously and theologically dangerous. Moreover, the rhetorical tradition in which Byzantine scholars were trained applied the same categories of analysis to both pagan and Christian texts, and linguistic affinity was not overridden by religious alienation. This chapter, focusing on the reception of texts about the gods, traces how Byzantine readers and writers coped with these tensions and found ways to ameliorate them. Pagan and Christian paradigms were at times juxtaposed, combined, or placed in an overt hierarchy. Through their selection of texts and commentaries on them, Byzantine scholars played a major role in shaping the modern “classical canon,” though this process is largely ignored by modern classical scholars. The chapter surveys the technologies (ideological and material) of this reception. How did the Byzantines cope with the gods?
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Pub Date : 2021-07-15DOI: 10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780199351763.013.1
M. Mullett
This brief postscript evaluates the place of Byzantine literature in the academy, and evaluates its current strengths. It looks back at a period when professors of Byzantine literature disparaged their subject matter, and it contrasts that era (c. 1970) with the position fifty years later, as large numbers of young scholars enter the field and are employed to do so, and to whom major research grants are awarded. The chapter locates itself in relation to other position papers written by the author in 1990, 2003, and 2010, and surveys the past twenty years in terms of conferences, publications, and other infrastructure, emphasizing the growth of texts, translations, and studies, and work on processes of literary production. It notes the confident place of rhetoric as the foundation of literary achievement in every genre and the arrival at a more nuanced periodization. Research has been informed by affective and cognitive neuroscience as well as by new philology, new historicism, post-classical narratology, and comparative approaches; it applauds the way that texts in Syriac, Arabic, Georgian, Armenian, and Latin are regarded as having a claim to be considered as Byzantine. It proposes a history of Byzantine literature.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-15DOI: 10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780199351763.013.16
Ioannis D. Polemis
The chapter is a case study of Byzantine learned rhetoric in action, and some of the complications that one faces when one applies the concept of “genre” to Byzantine rhetoric. The test case is the invective, in Greek ψόγος, from the perspective of Byzantine rhetorical education and practice. After a series of general observations on rhetorical definitions of the “invective,” as well as on the fact that the invective resembles more a rhetorical “mode,” which is present in a variety of “genres,” than a “genre” per se, the chapter reviews a few representative related texts from the middle and late Byzantine period.
本章是对拜占庭修辞学在实践中的案例研究，以及当人们将“体裁”的概念应用于拜占庭修辞学时所面临的一些复杂问题。从拜占庭修辞学教育和实践的角度来看，测试案例是希腊语中的谩骂，即ψ ο ος。在对“谩骂”的修辞定义进行了一系列的一般性观察之后，以及谩骂更像是一种修辞的“模式”，这种“模式”存在于各种“体裁”中，而不是一种“体裁”本身，本章回顾了拜占庭中后期一些有代表性的相关文本。
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Pub Date : 2021-07-15DOI: 10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780199351763.013.23
Charis Messis, Stratis Papaioannou
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.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-15DOI: 10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780199351763.013.28
Sandra Martani
Music plays an important role in Byzantine culture; however, only the melodies used in the sacred services have been preserved. Two main types of neumatic notation are used in liturgical books: the lectionary (or ekphonetic) notation—intended to guide the cantillation of the Scriptures—and the melodic notation, used to sing a variety of properly melodic chants. While ekphonetic notation appears in a considerable number of sources dating from the eighth century to the fourteenth/fifteenth centuries, scholars have not yet managed to decipher it. Signs recording musical elements are attested from the sixth century, but it is only from the mid-tenth century that articulated notational systems appear. Until about the mid-twelfth century, two main melodic notations, both adiastematic, were used: the so-called Chartres and Coislin notations. In its development, the Coislin notation leads to a new diastematic system, the so-called Middle Byzantine notation. However, the full diastemacy would be attained only with the Chrysanthos reform at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Melodic notation was used in different hymnographic genres, both syllabic and melismatic, and in psalmic texts. Theoretical treatises provide explanations on the rules needed to combine the neumes. From the fourteenth century onward, a new style appears and develops under the influence of a new aesthetic and of the Hesychastic movement—the καλοφωνία (beautiful voicing). In new or revisited compositions, music is privileged over text and the notation multiplies its μεγάλα σημάδια (big signs) to create a new meaning, a purely melodic one.
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