Byzantine News

Some interesting articles: PATRICK ANDRIST: Literary distance and complexity in late antique and early Byzantine Greek dialogues Adversus Iudaeos PÉTER TÓTH: New wine in old wineskin: Byzantine reuses of the apocryphal revelation dialogue   FLORIN LEONTE: Dramatisation and narrative in late Byzantine dialogues:Manuel II Palaiologos’s On Marriage and Mazaris’ Journey to Hades   NIELS GAUL: Embedded dialogues and dialogical voices in Palaiologan prose and verse   From the editors (Niels Gaul and Averil Cameron): Dialogues and Debates from Late Antiquity to Late Byzantium offers the first overall discussion of the literary and philosophical dialogue tradition in Greek from imperial Rome to the end of the Byzantine empire and beyond. Sixteen case studies combine theoretical approaches with in-depth analysis and include comparisons with the neighbouring Syriac, Georgian, Armenian and Latin traditions. Following an introduction and a discussion of Plutarch...

An article by M. Hinterberger (Cyprus) on vernacular Byzantine language: Since Antiquity the Byzantines had inherited the usage of classicizing Greek for a wide range of literary genres. In particular, for all kinds of rhetorical texts ancient and late antique authors served as models. Higher education aimed at providing a thorough familiarity with these models, firstly in order to understand them and secondly in order to compose texts by imitating the models. Since the range of recommended patterns extends from Homer to George of Pisidia (i.e. texts from the 8th c. B.C. to the 7th c. A.D.) and since authors were inevitably influenced, to a greater or lesser degree, by their everyday language, in most cases the textual product was a peculiar mixture with a specific Byzantine character, which however – and this has to be stressed – does not mean chaotic or arbitrary. The majority of less literary types of text however (such as theological treatises, hagiography, popular narrati...

Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies has recently published online A. Cameron's volume on Dialoguing in Late Antiquity. A passage from the Introduction : This book is about a particular form of writing by Christians in late antiquity, sometimes referred to as “the philosophical dialogue”—although by no means all the dialogues in question can be regarded as philosophical. The subject is central to the much wider question of the development of a specifically Christian rhetoric, especially in Perelman’s sense in which “the realm of rhetoric” constitutes “the entire universe of argumentative discourse,” [1] for Christian writers did indeed use the dialogue form as part of their argumentative endeavor. Click here to read the book

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