In Byzantine Studies we constantly deal with the translation of people across physical space, between media, from one language to another, and even in time, as scholars strive to bring the Byzantine past into the present. Whenever we discuss anthropomorphic entities, whether in a saint’s life, a romance, a letter, a work of history, or a work of art, we are constantly negotiating a tricky theoretical problem. We engage with them as textual and material constructs and, at the same time, as past people or (at least) as person-like. Translation is a practice that implies an exertion of non-consensual mobility, from displacing relics and human remains to relocating people embedded in textual or visual discourse into a different linguistic or cultural environment. In researching the Byzantine past and its material and textual traces, we regularly translate ‘people’ from one type of thing to another. Historians translate textual characters into past humans, art historians convert blotches of pigment into meaningful figural images, and literary critics spend a great deal of energy decomposing our first glance reading of the characters in novels and hagiography from people into their linguistic and structural components. Authority, whether that of the author, the reader, or the scholar is always at play in this process of translation. This can be said to mirror the political authority involved in involuntary displacement of living people. This roundtable seeks to explore this tricky phenomenon through an interdisciplinary panel looking at the translation of people in texts, on objects, and in the Byzantine past, with an eye to the exercise of power. It also aims to bring together a range of scholars specialising in different disciplines and of different career stages.
This paper explores the transformations of the figure of Mary of Egypt across a range of Byzantine poetic texts. It considers verse retellings of Sophronios’s Life of Mary of Egypt, non-narrative poems inspired by her story, and the Grottaferrata version of Digenis Akritis, which reconfigures elements of her legend within a different narrative framework. By…
The emperor and his retinue riding on the walls of Constantinople accompanying the ship bringing the foreign bride, the magnificently embroidered tent, the purple dress, the splendid wedding in Hagia Sophia, the birth of the heir-to-the throne … Although much has been written about the lives of foreign imperial brides in late medieval Byzantium, the…
Narratives frequently portray abduction either as the forced kidnapping of a noblewoman who is unwilling to marry or as the consensual elopement of two lovers who marry against their relativesʼ wishes. Due to the widespread popularity of Arthurian legends, which include the story of Guinevereʼs abduction — echoed in the 12th-century French romance Lancelot, ou…
The Chronicle of Morea designates a complex fourteenth-century historiographic tradition recounting the Frankish conquest and thirteenth-century political history of the Peloponnese. Preserved in four medieval languages and in both verse and prose, it represents a fundamentally translational work in its composition and reception. Although the Greek version likely preceded the shorter French one, its textual…