Metaphrasis:A Byzantine Concept of Rewriting and Its Hagiographical Products


Book Description

This volume represents the first discussion of rewriting in Byzantium. It brings together a rich variety of articles treating hagiographical rewriting from various angles. The contributors discuss and comment on different kinds of texts from late antiquity to late Byzantium.




The Hagiographical Experiment: Developing Discourses of Sainthood


Book Description

The Hagiographical Experiment: Developing Discourses of Sainthood throws fresh light on narratives about Christian holy men and women from Late Antiquity to Byzantium. Rather than focusing on the relationship between story and reality, it asks what literary choices authors made in depicting their heroes and heroines: how they positioned the narrator, how they responded to existing texts, how they utilised or transcended genre conventions for their own purposes, and how they sought to relate to their audiences. The literary focus of the chapters assembled here showcases the diversity of hagiographical texts written in Greek, Latin, Coptic, and Syriac, as well as pointing out the ongoing conversations that connect them. By asking these questions of this diverse group of texts, it illuminates the literary development of hagiography in the late antique, Byzantine, and medieval periods.




Poetry in Late Byzantium


Book Description

The late Byzantine period (thirteenth to fifteenth centuries) was marked by both cultural fecundity and political fragmentation, resulting in an astonishingly multifaceted literary output. This book addresses the poetry of the empire’s final quarter-millennium from a broad perspective, bringing together studies on texts originating in places from Crete to Constantinople and from court to school, treating topics from humanist antiquarianism to pious self-help, and written in styles from the vernacular to Homeric language. It thus offers a reference work to a much-neglected but rich textual material that is as varied as it was potent in the sociocultural contexts of its times. Contributors are Theodora Antonopoulou, Marina Bazzani, Julián Bértola, Martin Hinterberger, Krystina Kubina, Marc D. Lauxtermann, Florin Leonte, Ugo Mondini, Brendan Osswald, Giulia M. Paoletti, Cosimo Paravano, Daniil Pleshak, Alberto Ravani, and Federica Scognamiglio.




Symeon Metaphrastes


Book Description

The first monograph on the most important Byzantine redactor of saints' lives this book offers a detailed study of the life and working methods of Symeon Metaphrastes, who was active towards the end of the tenth century. The importance of the Metaphrastic redaction has often been measured by the amount of damage it did to the late-antique hagiographical texts, but in the present study it is seen as the culmination of long-term developments within this field. The Metaphrastic collection is studied in the context of its predecessors and in the gradual changes that occurred in the production of hagiography, especially as to the social background of authors, commissioners, and even saints. Emphasis is laid on the gradual redistribution, centralisation and upgrading of hagiographical texts that took place in the Greek world. And in this process rewriting is seen as a vehicle for a canonisation which, even if never instituted in Byzantium, was the intention and, to some degree, the outcome of the Metaphrastic redaction. Christian Høgel, PhD, is research fellow at the Institute for Greek and Latin, University of Copenhagen. He has formerly published a.o. Digterjeg'et i hellenistisk og augustisk poesi (The Poetic I in Hellenistic and Augustan poetry, MTF 1992).




The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Literature


Book Description

In twenty-five chapters by leading scholars, this volume propagates a nuanced understanding of Byzantine "literature", highlighting key problems, and presenting basic research tools for an audience of specialists and non-specialists.




Narrative, Imagination and Concepts of Fiction in Late Antique Hagiography


Book Description

This volume explores concepts of fiction in late antique hagiographical narrative in different cultural and literary traditions. It includes Greek, Latin, Syriac, Armenian, Persian and Arabic material. Whereas scholarship in these texts has traditionally focussed on historical questions, this book approaches imaginative narrative as an inherent element of the genre of hagiography that deserves to be studied in its own right. The chapters explore narrative complexities related to fiction, such as invention, authentication, intertextuality, imagination and fictionality. Together, they represent an innovative exploration of how these concepts relate to hagiographical discourses of truth and the religious notion of belief, while paying due attention to the various factors and contexts that impact readers’ responses.




Varieties of Post-classical and Byzantine Greek


Book Description

Linguistic varieties such as female speech, foreigner talk, and colloquial language have not gone unnoticed when it comes to Classical Greek, but little is known about later periods of the Greek language. In this collective volume leading experts in the field outline some of the most important varieties of Post-classical and Byzantine Greek, basing themselves on a broad range of literary and documentary sources, and advancing a number of innovative methodologies. Close attention is paid to the linguistic features that characterize these varieties, with in-depth discussions of lexical, morpho-syntactic, orthographic, and metrical variation, as well as the interrelationship between these different types of variation. The volume thus offers valuable insights into the nature of Post-classical and Byzantine Greek, laying the foundation for future studies of linguistic variation in these later stages of the language, while at the same time providing a point of comparison for Classical Greek scholarship




Survival and Success of an Apocryphal Childhood of Jesus


Book Description

This book explores the transformations of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas in the Middle Ages. It also connects the different representations of children, childhood, everyday- and family life in the distinct textual versions to the ancient and medieval settings in which they appear. The text survived and influenced ideas and mentalities that shaped medieval minds in the East and the West, but also enhanced anti-Jewish sentiments.




The Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography


Book Description

For an entire millennium, Byzantine hagiography, inspired by the veneration of many saints, exhibited literary dynamism and a capacity to vary its basic forms. The subgenres into which it branched out after its remarkable start in the fourth century underwent alternating phases of development and decline that were intertwined with changes in the political, social and literary spheres. The selection of saintly heroes, an interest in depicting social landscapes, and the modulation of linguistic and stylistic registers captured the voice of homo byzantinus down to the end of the empire in the fifteenth century. The seventeen chapters in this companion form the sequel to those in volume I which dealt with the periods and regions of Byzantine hagiography, and complete the first comprehensive survey ever produced in this field. The book is the work of an international group of experts in the field and is addressed to both a broader public and the scholarly community of Byzantinists, medievalists, historians of religion and theorists of narrative. It highlights the literary dimension and the research potential of a representative number of texts, not only those appreciated by the Byzantines themselves but those which modern readers rank high due to their literary quality or historical relevance.




Ethos, Logos, and Perspective


Book Description

Ethos, Logos, and Perspective represents the first comprehensive study of late Byzantine court rhetorical praise as a general phenomenon surfacing in many types of rhetorical epideictic compositions dating from the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries: panegyrics, encomia, city descriptions, encomiastic verses, or letters. The aim of this book is to reconstruct the two perspectives, idealism and pragmatism, that shaped authorial choices in matters of rhetorical style and composition. This study uncovers a little-known period in the history of Byzantine rhetoric. Proceeding from a nuanced understanding of the ancient concepts of ethos and logos, it analyzes the rhetoric of Byzantine praise in a modern theoretical framework. Unlike other previous studies of Byzantine rhetoric, the present research traces the structures and meanings that ultimately influenced the political attitudes and values circulating in the last century of Byzantine history. Another feature of this book is that it offers translations and discussions of important passages from the late Byzantine rhetoric, a corpus of texts that only recently has started to receive attention. This book will appeal to scholars, students, and all those interested in Byzantine literary culture (particularly in reference to moral and spiritual advice) and the techniques of Byzantine rhetoric. In addition, readers will also find informative approaches on the main authors and genres of late Byzantine rhetoric.