The Same Wine in New Wineskins: The Making of Joseph Bryennios’ Constantinopolitan Homiliary

Joseph Bryennios (c. 1350–c. 1431) was arguably one of the most distinguished theologians of Late Byzantium. A fervent apologist and prolific orator, Bryennios curated his vast oeuvre in two autograph editions: the ‘Cretan Treatises’ and the ‘Constantinopolitan Homiliary’. Comprising forty-four pieces with various foci (dogmatic, festal, apologetic, circumstantial, etc.), the Homiliary intriguingly incorporates—often verbatim—vast portions of the Cretan Corpus. Indeed, intertextuality represents the central ingredient of Bryennios’ rhetorical output. At that, building on my doctoral research, the goal of this paper is twofold. First, I will elucidate the curatorial program of the collection and briefly reveal the intertextual debt of each oration: how, where, and to what extent Bryennios chose to recycle his older materials. Second, I will tackle the literary and authorial implications of this technique. What are the hermeneutical ramifications of such florilegic redactions or, in other words, what ‘changes’ when the same text is inserted into a new rhetorical setting? Why did Bryennios resort to this compositional approach and what does it convey about his intentions and self-representational strategies? Finally, how did he perceive the balance between ‘new’ and ‘traditional’ in the predicatory act and how may intertextuality help us enrich our study of Byzantine homiletics?