"Aristocracy and Literary Production in the Tenth Century", international conference Byzantine authorship: theories and practices, Durham University, Department of Classics and Ancient History, July 23-25, 2012 (original) (raw)
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2021
With an Excursus on Symeon Metaphrastes) Stratis Papaioannou Two types of questions may, at the very least, be asked about authorship in Byzantium. The first would pertain to sociohistorical conditions: the who, how, when, and where of authors, their social profile, that is, careers, and experience as authors. The second should address notions of authorship: how it was conceived; what was its cultural significance; and, more crucially, whether the author-understood here in the most basic sense of the primary producer of discourse, in writing and/ or in speaking-mattered or not for the creation, preservation, and reception of literature. To survey the former issues would amount to a social history of Byzantium, and especially of its middle and upper classes, namely those groups to which most Byzantine eponymous authors belonged. To answer the latter set of questions would require a foray into the "subconscious" of literary production and reception in Byzantium. The brief chapter that follows has a modest aim: to introduce both sets of questions, focusing especially on the latter, in order to provide interpretive frameworks for the study of the function, value, and effect of authorial agency in Byzantine society and, more so, literature. We shall begin with some data regarding the realities of authorship in Byzantium, from both a diachronic and a synchronic perspective. The rest of our exploration will be devoted to the Byzantine understanding of authorship. We shall do this by treating authors as integral to the phenomenology (and not merely the sociology) of literature. In this investigation, our main guides will be (a) Byzantine theories of literature, as evident in the context of discursive education and the textual as well as visual representations of authors; and (b) Byzantine manuscript culture, to the extent that the material realities of book production and availability required authorial attribution for the inclusion and faithful copying of a text or, alternatively, created the space for misattribution, falsification, and anonymity in textual production. 1
Association des Amis du Centre d’Histoire et Civilisation de Byzance ACHCByz, Filippo Ronconi, Salvatore Cosentino, Andy Hilkens, Geoffrey Greatrex, Lee Mordechai, Warren Treadgold, Irina Tamarkina, Anna Kotłowska, Bernard POUDERON, Muriel Debié, Marek Jankowiak, Andrzej Kompa, Jesse W. Torgerson, Constantin Zuckerman, Łukasz Różycki
TM XIX, 2015
This book presents the proceedings of the conference “The Chronicle of Theophanes: sources, composition, transmission,” organized by the editors in Paris in September 2012. The first section of the volume is devoted to the question of the authorship of the Chronicle, raised by C. Mango almost forty years ago. The second section is devoted to issues of transmission, both direct (manuscript tradition) and indirect (readership, translations). The third section concerns Theophanes’ sources for early Byzantine history. A separate section hosts papers by some of the major actors in the current debate on Theophanes’ Eastern source. The last section of the book deals with the later part of the Chronicle and with its sources. ISBN 978-2-916716-58-9
The paper focuses on John Tzetzes (ca. 1110-after 1166), well-known teacher and scholar of the Komnenian era, with the aim of examining two issues. On the one hand, Tzetzes’ opinions about the teaching practice of schedography are collected and analyzed, while on the other, his opinions about everyday language and its possible uses are scrutinized through a close reading of many different passages from his works. In particular, the long epilogue of his Theogony (its three parts united for the first time on the printed page), written for the sebastokratorissa Eirene around the middle of the twelfth century, is discussed in detail for it offers a unique discussion of what is the appropriate way of addressing and writing for audieces of different social and educatonal status. The analyis and interpretation of the texts shows that Tzetzes’ “idiosyncratic” personality, as it appears in his writings is not a purely personal matter, but is strongly related to the competitive environment of the capital and to Tzetzes’ “middle-class” position in Constantinopolitan society. The paper also demonstrates that the boundaries of usage between “learned” and “colloquial” discourse are quite fluid and this fluidity can be used in certain contexts to the advantage of a teacher in promoting his status and financial success or to his disadvantage if he has to defend his choices against a rival. The paper ends with a broader analysis of the term oikonomia used by Tzetzes in the Theogony epilogue and the meaning of this term within the system of literary patronage under the Komnenoi.
The present paper proposes a new periodization model for the history of Byzantine literature between the 11th and the 15th century. The paper examines first the use of the historical model in the periodization schemata of various overviews of Byzantine literature along with the essentialist and teleological concepts inherent in this model. Two further sections present the arguments concerning the insignificance of 1204 and 1453 for a literary history of Byzantium because both dates did not leave a visible imprint on the way people wrote after the disasters had occured, while their presence as historical markers of an abrupt end obscures the continuities and the important changes that took place around them. In two last sections the paper offers two new boundaries that are not instantaneous moments in history but fluid and broad segments of time in its unbroken stream. The years around 1050 and 1350 are marked by a series of changes in the way logoi were perceived both in school and in actual practice, and it is, therefore, proposed that Byzantine literature from the eleventh century onwards is shaped by two fluid periods: 1050-1350 and 1350-1500.