5.04 RT – After Byzantine Antioch: Multilingualism and Greek Manuscript Culture in the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean

During the period of the Byzantine duchy of Antioch (969-1084), substantial exchanges of texts, translations, manuscripts, and techniques of book production took place between Constantinople, Syria and the Palestinian-Sinaitic area, including the large-scale project of rendering the Greek patristic and liturgical heritage into Syriac and Arabic. After a long period of neglect, these intellectual activities have rightly drawn the recent attention of scholars. However, the extent to which these exchanges continued or underwent transformations during the Saljuk, Crusader and Mamluk periods is still insufficiently explored. The aim of the proposed RT is to investigate how Greek manuscript culture survived and coexisted with those of the other Christian communities (Syriac, Arabic, Armenian) in Palestine, Sinai, and Syria from ca. the 12th to the 15th century. The papers will present several case studies which will showcase these developments and exchanges: the focus will be on Greek, Syriac and multilingual manuscripts of biblical, patristic and liturgical content. This round table intends to shed new light on the history of Greek manuscript culture beyond the borders of the Byzantine Empire, on the on-going translations of Byzantine literature, and on the meaning of writing and copying manuscripts in the multilingual environment of the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean.