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…
This paper examines how modern scholarly approaches to the Late Byzantine romance have evolved over the past 130 years and asks how these narratives might be made accessible to audiences beyond a narrow circle of specialist Byzantinists. The first part traces the shifting academic reception of the romances, from early philologists’ dismissive assessments— focused narrowly…
From the mid-fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, the interest of educated Western Europeans in Byzantine literature was stimulated by a widening knowledge of Classical Greek and by the rise of printing. These two factors operated in Greece itself to a very limited degree. Parts of the country, such as Crete, that were under Italian rule,…
This article examines readings of Byzantine literature in the centuries following the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453. Moving beyond the familiar story of hostility or indifference towards these texts, it argues that readers instrumentalized Byzantine texts as tools for reconfiguring the past, present, and future. Humanists in Vienna used Byzantine historians to rewrite Roman…