The teaching of Greek grammar was at the centre of education in the Byzantine Empire; its officials, for example, had to have demonstrated solid linguistic skills before being able to contribute to the complex imperial bureaucratic apparatus. Related to this essential fulcrum of Byzantine culture was a series of satellite activities and networks, each with its own degree of complexity and dynamism: the adaptation of grammatical knowledge to the students’ changing needs; the negotiation of grammatical norms; the production of books; the competition between schools and among students, who ultimately aimed to succeed in their careers. Our round table discussion aims to (i) challenge the common consideration pertaining to the teaching of Greek grammar, and (ii) use its study to better comprehend Byzantium itself. The various papers will discuss: (1) the origins and diachrony development of Greek grammatical knowledge from antiquity to the post-Byzantine period; (2) the exchange between grammatical traditions linking the Byzantine Empire to other Greek-speaking communities, and (neighbouring) communities; (3) the dynamism linked to the teaching of Greek as it emerges from the manuscripts; (4) the non-self-referentiality of the teaching and its link with the society and literature of the time; (5) its timeless universality and impact on modern languages, alongside its role in shaping contemporary academic curricula. By considering the medieval teaching of Greek grammar well beyond the conventional geographical and chronological limits of Byzantium, and innovatively applying a multidisciplinary and comparative approach, our roundtable offers a new look at the grammatical phenomenon in Byzantium and beyond.
Continuing a tradition from antiquity, Byzantine linguistic literature is often concerned with the lexicon or, at most, the relationship between singular words and their closest neighbours. In keeping with this, a lot of the modern research on Byzantine linguistics and language learning deals with lexicography and similar topics. Nonetheless, there are examples of how Byzantine…
Byzantine grammar textbooks are mainly transmitted as manuscript miscellanies of unstable structure: they were assembled as ad hoc sets of texts for given educational purposes, and over time they could be reorganized and supplemented. Therefore, extant manuscripts containing Greek grammatical texts often comprise codicological units that originated at different phases of the book’s history. That…
Since the Imperial age, Classical Attic formed the core of advanced Greek education. Under the influence of Atticism, rhetoricians and prose writers were expected to master this dialect—even when, like Galen, they chose not to use it. In Byzantium too, Attic remained central to rhetorical training within broader classicizing trends. Yet the spoken language had…
Among the language disciplines, rhetoric has received much attention as providing the framework for literary composition in Byzantium, while grammar has predominantly been studied for the methods of language teaching and the standards of Greek taught in the Byzantine classroom. This paper will instead explore the broader foundational role that grammar played in establishing the…
The recent publication of a textbook for the teaching of Greek (Miscellanea Laurentiana) has prompted a reconsideration of how linguistic knowledge is acquired and represented. Drawing on lexical priming, generative syntax, and construction grammar, this paper argues that Byzantine textbooks for learning Greek functioned as repositories of exempla and rules that collectively depict a linguistic…