The Materiality of Reading Poetry in Byzantium

This paper reassesses how Byzantine poetry was read, arguing that an exclusive focus on oral performance obscures the significance of its material, written contexts. While orality was undeniably an important factor, numerous poems reveal that the physicality of texts and the act of visual reading were equally central to their reception. The paper discusses verse disputes in the margins of manuscripts, invective exchanges on scrolls, and the status of the poem as an object in other written genres. Manuscripts emerge as spaces for intellectual debate and literary production. Acrostics and stichometric games highlight the physicality of poems as objects. Byzantine poems circulated as pamphlets, gifts, pedagogical tools with visual aids, and even devotional items. Thus, poetic objects were given various cultural, intellectual, and spiritual meanings. In sum, the paper proposes to see Byzantine poetic culture as a spectrum of practices: hearing and reciting, but also writing, annotating, seeing, and handling. Each act of poetic communication consisted of an interplay between orality and textuality/materiality (the latter best captured by the German term Schriftlichkeit).