Toward a Conceptual Reception of Byzantine Rhetorical Hermeneutic

While the importance of Hermogenes in Renaissance rhetoric has been hardly underestimated, the question of the role played by the mediation of the Byzantine reflections on the corpus has been overlooked. And yet the Aldine edition that brought to the Western public Hermogenes of Tarsus was complete with the "super-commentary" compiled by Maximos Planudes, consolidating some 700 years of exegetical tradition. Such commentary therefore became for a while the first port of call for those readers who wanted to make sense of the Corpus Hermogenianum. In this paper, I will present an overview of the evidence showing that Byzantine hermeneutical tradition was engaged with not only by Greek and Italian humanists but travelled further north, leaving a mark in the work of reformed intellectuals such as Johannes Sturm. In so doing, I will attempt an outline of the complex entangled tradition coalescing around the 'Byzantine Hermogenes' and retracing its migrations toward Northern Europe.