Byzantine News

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

The Canons of Our Fathers. Monastic Rules of Shenoute by Bentley Layton From the presentation of the book: This book is the first publication of a very early collection of Christian monastic rules from Roman Egypt. Designed for the so-called White Monastery Federation, a community of monks and nuns who banded together about 360 CE, the rules are quoted by the great monastic leader Shenoute of Atripe in his writings of the fourth and fifth century. These rules provide new and intimate access to the earliest phases of Christian communal (cenobitic) monasticism. The Table of Contents : Preface I: The Nature of the Rules Introduction 1: The Historical Context of the Rules 2: The Corpus of Monastic Rules 3: Monastic Life as seen in the Rules 4: Monastic Experience and Monastic Rules Subject Index to Part I Index of Rule Numbers cited in Part III I: Corpus of Monastic Rules Abbreviations for Libraries and Museums Holding the Coptic Manuscripts Editorial SignsThe Rules, ...

The latest updated list with Byzantine editions and translations can be consulted here

A new volume on middle Byzantine poetry was recently published at Oxford University Press: Writing and Reading Byzantine Secular Poetry, 1025-1081 , by Floris Bernard. Here is the abstract: In the mid eleventh century, secular poetry attained a hitherto unseen degree of wit, vividness, and personal involvement, chiefly exemplified in the poetry of Christophoros Mitylenaios, Ioannes Mauropous, and Michael Psellos. This book examines the various social occasions, opportunities, and constraints that motivated and influenced the reading and writing of poetic texts. It critically reconsiders modern assumptions about poetry, focusing instead on Byzantine conceptions of the role of poetry in society. By providing a detailed account of the various media through which poetry was presented to its readers, and by tracing the initial circulation of poems, it takes an interest in the Byzantine reader and his/her reading habits and strategies, addressing aspects of performance and visual re...

An interesting and detailed article about a topic good for those who enjoy spending time in a garden: Byzantine Monastic Horticulture:The Textual Evidence, by A.-M. Talbot From the introduction: There is a paucity of evidence on Byzantine gardens, both textual and archaeological. Whenwe turn to monastic horticulture, however, the situation is somewhat less bleak, for bothfoundation documents (typika) and saints’ lives shed occasional light on the gardens, vineyards,and orchards that provided food, drink, and eucharistic wine for the use of the residentmonks or nuns. The surviving textual sources should ideally be supplemented by thefindings of archaeological excavation of actual monastic gardens. Such excavation, whichhas been carried out to date primarily in the late Roman monasteries of Palestine, can onlybe touched upon in this essay, in which I focus on the literary evidence. For the most part Ilimit my observations to those gardens situated in the immediate vicinity of mon...

The Suda Lexikon, a great source for the study of Classics and of the Byzantine literary culture, dating from the 10th c., the golden age of the Byzantine Empire, is very close to having a complete online English version. Click here to visit the project webpage

The venerable collection of classical authors will have a digital version in a few months. Founded by James Loeb in 1911, the mission of Loeb Classical Library® has always been to make Classical Greek and Latin literature accessible to the broadest range of readers. The Digital Loeb Classical Library extends this mission into the twenty-first century. Harvard University Press is honored to renew James Loeb’s vision of accessibility, and presents an interconnected, fully searchable, perpetually growing, virtual library of all that is important in Greek and Latin literature. Epic and lyric poetry; tragedy and comedy; history, travel, philosophy, and oratory; the great medical writers and mathematicians; those Church Fathers who made particular use of pagan culture—in short, our entire Greek and Latin Classical heritage is represented here with up-to-date texts and accurate English translations. More than 520 volumes of Latin, Greek, and English texts are available in a modern and el...