Download or read book Writer and Occasion in Twelfth Century Byzantium written by Ingela Nilsson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-17 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first comprehensive study of occasional writing in Byzantium, focusing on the literary output of Constantine Manasses.
Download or read book John Zonaras Epitome of Histories written by Theofili Kampianaki and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-09 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The twelfth-century chronicle of John Zonaras, which begins with the biblical Creation and ends in 1118, is one of the longest historical accounts written in Greek that has come down to us. It was also one of the most popular historical works of the Greek-speaking world during the Middle Ages,with a remarkably large number of manuscripts preserving the entire text or parts of it.John Zonaras' Epitome of Histories: A Compendium of Jewish-Roman History and Its Reception analyses Zonaras' chronicle as both a literary composition and a historical account. It concentrates on its composition, sources, and political, ideological, and literary background. It also includesdiscussions that go beyond the text, such as on the intellectual networks surrounding Zonaras, and the anticipated audience and the reception of the chronicle. By examining such issues, Theofili Kampianaki aims to present Zonaras' chronicle as a product which emerged from a milieu characterized bythe increased contacts with Western people and the Komnenian style of rulership in the imperial bureaucracy, and as a work which seamlessly merges the traditions of chronicle writing and classicizing historiography.
Download or read book Byzantine Commentaries on Ancient Greek Texts 12th 15th Centuries written by Baukje van den Berg and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-09-08 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first volume to explore the commentaries on ancient texts produced and circulating in Byzantium. It adopts a broad chronological perspective (from the twelfth to the fifteenth century) and examines different types of commentaries on ancient poetry and prose within the context of the study and teaching of grammar, rhetoric, philosophy and science. By discussing the exegetical literature of the Byzantines as embedded in the socio-cultural context of the Komnenian and Palaiologan periods, the book analyses the frameworks and networks of knowledge transfer, patronage and identity building that motivated the Byzantine engagement with the ancient intellectual and literary tradition.
Download or read book Poetry in Late Byzantium written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-07-04 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Vera Lex Historiae written by Catalin Taranu and published by punctum books. This book was released on 2022-08-18 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing circa 731 CE, Bede professes in the introduction to his Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum that he will write his account of the past of the English following only vera lex historiae. Whether explicitly or (most often) implicitly, historians narrate the past according to a conception of what constitutes historical truth that emerges in the use of narrative strategies, of certain formulae or textual forms, in establishing one's own ideological authority or that of one's informants, in faithfulness to a cultural, narrative, or poetic tradition. If we extend the scope of what we understand by history (especially in a pre-modern setting) to include not just the writings of historians legitimated by their belonging to the Latinate matrix of christianized classical history writing, but also collective narratives, practices, rituals, oral poetry, liturgy, artistic representations, and acts of identity - all re-enacting the past as, or as representation of, the present, we find a plethora of modes of constructions of historical truth, narrative authority, and reliability. Vera Lex Historiae? will be constituted by contributions that reveal the variety of evental strategies by which historical truth was constructed in late antiquity and the earlier Middle Ages, and the range of procedures by which such narratives were established first as being historical and then as "true" histories. This is not only a matter of narrative strategies, but also habitus, ways of living and acting in the world that feed on and back into the commemoration and re-enactment of the past by communities and by individuals. In doing this, we hope to recover something of the plurality of modes of preserving and reenacting the past available in late antiquity and the earlier middle ages which we pass by because of preconceived notions of what constitutes history writing.
Download or read book Witness Literature in Byzantium written by Adam J. Goldwyn and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-08-06 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes Byzantine examples of witness literature, a genre that focuses on eyewitness accounts written by slaves, prisoners, refugees, and other victims of historical atrocity. It focuses on such episodes in three nonfictional texts – John Kaminiates’ Capture of Thessaloniki (904), Eustathios of Thessaloniki’s Capture of Thessaloniki (1186), and Niketas Choniates’ History (ca. 1204–17) – and the three extant twelfth-century Komnenian novels to consider how the authors’ positions as both eyewitness and victim require an interpretive method that distinguishes witness literature from other kinds of writing about the past. Drawing on theoretical developments in the fields of Holocaust and Genocide Studies (such as Giorgio Agamben’s homo sacer and Michel Foucault’s biopolitics) and comparisons with modern examples (Elie Wiesel’s Night and Primo Levi’s If This is a Man), Witness Literature emphasizes the affective, subjective, and experiential in medieval Greek historical writing.
Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Human Animal Relations in the Byzantine World written by Przemysław Marciniak and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-12-03 with total page 507 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Animals have recently become recognized as significant agents of history as part of the ‘animal turn’ in historical studies. Animals in Byzantium were human companions, a source of entertainment and food – it is small wonder that they made their way into literature and the visual arts. Moreover, humans defined themselves and their activities by referring to non-human animals, either by anthropomorphizing animals (as in the case of the Cat-Mice War) or by animalizing humans and their (un)wanted behaviours. The Routledge Handbook of Human-Animal Relations in the Byzantine World offers an in-depth survey of the relationships between humans and non-human animals in the Byzantine Empire. The contributions included in the volume address both material (zooarchaeology, animals as food, visual representations of animals) and immaterial (semiotics, philosophy) aspects of human-animal coexistence in chapters written by leading experts in their field. This book will appeal to students and scholars alike researching Byzantine social and cultural history, as well as those interested in the history of animals. This book marks an important step in the development of animal studies in Byzantium, filling a gap in the wider research on the history of human-animal relations in the Middle Ages.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Literature written by Stratis Papaioannou and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-05 with total page 785 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume, the first ever of its kind in English, introduces and surveys Greek literature in Byzantium (330 - 1453 CE). In twenty-five chapters composed by leading specialists, The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Literature surveys the immense body of Greek literature produced from the fourth to the fifteenth century CE and advances a nuanced understanding of what "literature" was in Byzantium. This volume is structured in four sections. The first, "Materials, Norms, Codes," presents basic structures for understanding the history of Byzantine literature like language, manuscript book culture, theories of literature, and systems of textual memory. The second, "Forms," deals with the how Byzantine literature works: oral discourse and "text"; storytelling; rhetoric; re-writing; verse; and song. The third section ("Agents") focuses on the creators of Byzantine literature, both its producers and its recipients. The final section, entitled "Translation, Transmission, Edition," surveys the three main ways by which we access Byzantine Greek literature today: translations into other Byzantine languages during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages; Byzantine and post-Byzantine manuscripts; and modern printed editions. The volume concludes with an essay that offers a view of the recent past--as well as the likely future--of Byzantine literary studies.
Download or read book Writer and Occasion in Twelfth Century Byzantium written by Ingela Nilsson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-17 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In twelfth-century Constantinople, writers worked on commission for the imperial family or aristocratic patrons. Texts were occasioned by specific events, representing both a link between writer and patron and between literary imagination and empirical reality. This is a study of how one such writer, Constantine Manasses, achieved that aim. Manasses depicted and praised the present by drawing from the rich sources of the Graeco-Roman and Biblical tradition, thus earning commissions from wealthy 'friends' during a career that spanned more than three decades. While the occasional literature of writers like Manasses has sometimes been seen as 'empty rhetoric', devoid of literary ambition, this study assumes that writing on command privileges originality and encourages the challenging of conventions. A society like twelfth-century Byzantium, in which occasional writing was central, called for a strong and individual authorial presence, since voice was the primary instrument for a successful career.
Download or read book Ethos Logos and Perspective written by Florin Leonte and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-03-10 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Sources for Byzantine Art History Volume 3 The Visual Culture of Later Byzantium 1081 c 1350 written by Foteini Spingou and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-21 with total page 1683 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book the beauty and meaning of Byzantine art and its aesthetics are for the first time made accessible through the original sources. More than 150 medieval texts are translated from nine medieval languages into English, with commentaries from over seventy leading scholars. These include theories of art, discussions of patronage and understandings of iconography, practical recipes for artistic supplies, expressions of devotion, and descriptions of cities. The volume reveals the cultural plurality and the interconnectivity of medieval Europe and the Mediterranean from the late eleventh to the early fourteenth centuries. The first part uncovers salient aspects of Byzantine artistic production and its aesthetic reception, while the second puts a spotlight on particular ways of expressing admiration and of interpreting of the visual.
Download or read book Mobility and Migration in Byzantium A Sourcebook written by Claudia Rapp and published by V&R unipress. This book was released on 2023-06-12 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mobility and migration were not uncommon in Byzantium, as is true for all societies. Yet, scholarship is only beginning to pay attention to these phenomena. This book presents in English translation a wide array of relevant source texts from ca. 650 to ca. 1450 originally written in medieval Greek: from administrative records, saints’ lives and letters by churchmen to ego-documents by ambassadors and historical narratives by court historians. Each source text is accompanied by a detailed introduction, commentary and further bibliography, thus making the book accessible to both scholars and students and laying the groundwork for future research on the internal dynamics of Byzantine society.
Download or read book Kalligraphos Essays on Byzantine Language Literature and Palaeography written by Alexander Alexakis and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-07-04 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present volume is a Festschrift in honor of the distinguished scholar in Late Byzantine, post-Byzantine and Cretan Renaissance studies I. Mavromatis. The title Kalligraphos is indicative of the foundations of his scholarship, which lie in the fields of paleography and early printing. With manuscripts and early printed books as the primary material of his studies, Professor Mavromatis has produced several major works in the fields of Byzantine philology, Cretan Renaissance literature (especially Erotorcritos) and late Byzantine vernacular poetry. This volume includes a short preface and twenty-four articles by senior and younger scholars, former colleagues, collaborators, and students of Professor Mavromatis. The articles are loosely arranged in chronological order of their subject matter and treat issues ranging from Byzantine historiography going back to the 4th century CE to post-Byzantine Cretan poetry of the 17th century. This philological kaleidoscope features new editions and interpretations of hitherto unknown or little-known poems and texts. The volume is intended for scholars, graduate and undergraduate students and the general readership interested in Byzantine and post-Byzantine literature.
Download or read book Homer the Rhetorician written by Baukje van den Berg and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-07 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Homer the Rhetorician is the first monograph study devoted to the monumental Commentary on the Iliad by Eustathios of Thessalonike, one of the most renowned orators and teachers of the Byzantine twelfth century. Homeric poetry was a fixture in the Byzantine educational curriculum and enjoyed special popularity under the Komnenian emperors. For Eustathios, Homer was the supreme paradigm of eloquence and wisdom. Writing for an audience of aspiring or practising prose writers, he explains in his commentary what it is that makes Homer's composition so successful in rhetorical terms. This study explores the exemplary qualities that Eustathios recognizes in the poet as author and the Iliad as rhetorical masterpiece. In this way, it advances our understanding of the rhetorical thought of a leading intellectual and the role of a cultural authority as respected as Homer in one of the most fertile periods in Byzantine literary history.
Download or read book Spatialities of Byzantine Culture from the Human Body to the Universe written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-11-14 with total page 705 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Compensating a four-decades shortfall, this collective volume is the first reader in Byzantine spatial studies. It offers a diversity of topics and scientific approaches, articulated by up-to-date interdisciplinary dialogue, and reflects on the future challenges of Byzantine spatial studies.
Download or read book A Short History of the Byzantine Empire written by Dionysios Stathakopoulos and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-06-15 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Incorporating the latest scholarly developments to offer an in-depth account of the history of the Byzantine Empire, this revised edition sheds new light on the Empire's culture, theology, and economic and socio-political spheres. Charting from the Empire's origins, to its expansion and influence over the Mediterranean, later revival, and eventual fall this book covers more than 1,000 years of history. With analysis of the Empire's changing social infrastructure, key events, and the broader cultural environment, Stathakopoulos expertly analyses how and why it became a powerhouse of literature, art, theology and learning, whilst also examining its aftermath and afterlife and enduring significance today. Drawing on a variety of English and non-English sources, in addition to a plethora of visual and textual materials, this book is an invaluable resource for scholars, students, and general readers alike.
Download or read book Theodoros Prodromos Miscellaneous Poems written by Nikos Zagklas and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-05-25 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In twelfth-century Byzantium, poetry played a key part in various contexts of textual production and consumption. One of the leading poets of this period was Theodoros Prodromos, whose surviving corpus comprises approximately 17,000 verses. Even though most of his poetry has been presented in modern critical editions, a group of his works has been overlooked by modern philologists and literary scholars alike. The selected corpus--conventionally designated as Miscellaneous Poems--consists of texts on various themes and in a wide range of genres, ranging from cycles of religious and secular epigrams to riddles, ethopoiiai, and works of a self-referential and essayistic nature. This book includes the first critical edition and study of these poems, accompanied by English translations and commentaries. Their study contributes to a more nuanced picture of Prodromos' intellectual profile, expanding his image as the 'poet laureate' of the Komnenian court and providing entirely new insights into his activity in the different settings of Constantinopolitan intellectual life. The book also sheds new light on the complex relationship between patronage and other aspects of literary activity and the circulation of the same text in different performative contexts.
