Texts are not static objects, and readers are not passive agents; they reshape, reinterpret, and reinvent texts in response to evolving intellectual, cultural, and political demands, as well as individual aims and aspirations. This panel explores the active role of the Byzantines as readers, rewriters and mediators across genres and periods. This group session will focus on four areas: (a) reception of medical literature, (b) hagiography across the Byzantine border to Syria, (c) historiography between Late Antiquity and the Middle Byzantine period, and (d) paraenetic poetry in the Palaiologan Period. By encompassing scientific, religious, historical, and literary domains, these case studies seek to elucidate the dynamics of reading and rewriting across diverse textual practices. Whether engaging with medical treatises, translating hagiography across physical boundaries, reworking historical traditions, or re-writing advice, readers invariably assume an active role — shaped both by the nature of the texts they engage with and by their own identities, dispositions, and socio-cultural environments. Together, these papers highlight and confirm the blurred boundaries between reading, writing, and rewriting in Byzantine culture, while also seeking to move beyond textual and authorial frameworks, shifting the focus to the readers themselves: who they were, how they engaged with texts, and why their interventions mattered.
To undertake the task of writing universal history, the Byzantine chronicler necessarily becomes reader of a variety of texts, such as documents and historical sources, literary works, religious and sapiential writings. The chronicler’s reading is not a passive one: as previous texts are read in order to draw from them material to create the author’s…
Meletios Galesiotes (c. 1209–1286), also known as Homologetes, ranks among the most influential intellectuals of Palaiologan Byzantium. Best known for his opposition to the Union of the Churches, he was also one of the period’s most prolific poets, though much of his work still awaits a critical edition. During his exile on Skyros, Meletios composed…
Psellos, both scholar and attentive reader of medical texts, draws on inherited medical knowledge to reveal the moral character of the emperors he describes in the Chronographia. In doing so, he operates on two levels: the uninitiated reader perceives the account of disease as a mere historical report, whereas the informed reader – capable of…
Revered as acheiropoietos (i.e., not made by human hands), the image of Christ from Edessa was a sacred cloth with Jesus’ face. When the city of Edessa was conquered by the Byzantine army, the emperor Romanos I Lekapenos had that precious object brought to Constantinople on 16th of August 944. The relic, later called Mandylion…