Grammatical Texts: Subtexts for Byzantine Emotional Performance

Rhetorical texts, in manuscript form, were meant to be re-delivered with as high a degree of fidelity to the original as possible. In the pre-Gutenberg world, the text merely set the stage; it represented the living presence of the living word. Beyond the words and punctuation on the page, however, is the question of vocal nuance; and as anyone who has studied a musical instrument well knows, it’s never enough simply to hit the right notes; you have to know how to hit them. This has led to very fruitful explorations—written, mostly—of how verbal display was moderated and presented in a typical Byzantine milieu. Was there emotion? Yes. But the surface of the text, with all of its carefully transcribed punctuation, can only offer a surface understanding of the uses of emotion and its live interpretation. What we lack is the context in which these emotions were first constructed and honed for public performance: which emotions were given the greatest attention? What were intellectuals trained to reveal through words, and what were they trained to conceal? What vocal inflections were they trained to use? We have yet to grasp what these performances actually sounded like. The grammatical texts, with scholia, offer us the most fully annotated oral tradition imaginable. Epic and dramatic texts were memorized and performed on a daily basis, with special attention to the tone of voice and, even more tantalizing, the thoughts of the character performed. This presentation will offer a window into the earliest iterations of emotional production in the Byzantine grammar school, as revealed by the long-neglected scholia, which functioned in much the same way as rehearsal notes in modern theatre. We will begin to uncover the kinds of emotion that were prized in the classroom and the degrees of explicit and discreet display inherent in the text.