When considering the literary production of Byzantium, one naturally thinks of Greek. Yet from its beginnings to its decline—and throughout its Fortleben—Byzantium was consistently a multilingual community. This panel seeks to explore the dimensions of otherness and openness by examining translation activities from a comparative, diachronic, and holistic perspective. The case studies presented here examine, for the first time, a number of unedited and understudied texts, demonstrating that the study of translation in Byzantium illuminates the vibrant dialogue among diverse linguistic, political, religious, and cultural communities. Specifically, our papers will: (i) present new methodological insights informed by linguistics, translation studies, and cultural studies; (ii) investigate topics such as the reception of Aristotle in Syriac and Arabic philosophical traditions, and in medieval Western Europe; Slavonic translations of Greek liturgical and hagiographical texts in the early and middle Byzantine periods; Demetrios Kydones’ translations of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae; and the reception of Anselm of Canterbury during the Palaeologan period. Covering a span of nine centuries and treating translations as key sources for understanding the often-overlooked multicultural character of Byzantium, this Thematic Session aligns closely with the main theme of the Congress and relates particularly to plenary sessions 1, 4, and 5.
The recent significant progress in the study of the translation of Latin theological texts in late Byzantium enables us further to investigate into the reception of Thomas Aquinas’s moral thought in a way that goes beyond pinpointing and discussing isolated cases of either rejection or selective acceptance of individual theses. This paper proposes a more…
The Syriac reception of the Greek philosophical tradition at the early sixth century AD marks the beginning of the process of transition of Greek philosophy “from Alexandria to Baghdad”. The beginning of this process is associated with the work of Sergius of Reshaina (d. 536) who studied philosophy and medicine in Alexandria under Ammonius Hermeiou…
Collections of question-and-answer literature circulated widely in various combinations throughout the Byzantine tradition. One notable example is the Greek compilation attributed to Anastasius. In the ninth century, an anonymous compiler reworked a set of 103 questions by Anastasius of Sinai into a reduced version of 23, which was subsequently embedded within a larger compilation known…
Cur Deus homo, Anselm’s major exposition of the Christian doctrine of redemption, was translated into Greek by Manuel Kalekas in the fourteenth century. This undertaking was part of a broader movement of Greek translations of Latin theological works by the so-called Latinophrones. In the politically and religiously turbulent context of late Byzantium, these scholars sought…