1,720,998 research outputs found
‘Emotions and λόγος ἐνδιάθετος: Πάθη in John Sikeliotes’ commentary on Hermogenes’ On types of style
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The Occasionality of Byzantine Didacticism:a Case Study from the Twelfth Century (Milan, Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana, C 222 inf. f. 218r)
Full text linkThe paper analyses, edits and translates an unknown didactic poem on prosodic quantity attributed to John Tzetzes. The poem contains an autobiographical and personal component that has a lyrical dimension, challenging the way in which both didactic poetry and Byzantine poetry is traditionally understood. Moreover, manuscripts such as the one preserving the poem under investigation may be seen as sites for both the frozen moment of the didactic occasion and a continuation of the debate in the form of authorial comments on and to the scribe. Overall, the paper argues that didactic poetry in Byzantium was marked by improvisation and personal experience: in other words, a kind of occasionality
Afterword: A Perspective from the Far (Medieval) West on Byzantine Theory and Practice of Authorship
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“A Hand of Ivory”:Moving Objects in Psellos’ Oration for his Daughter Styliane. A Case-Study
No full textThis paper takes its cue from the recent interest in materiality and “things” in the field of Byzantine studies, to explore the role of objects in evoking being moved. First, it advances a new model to explain the relationship between being moved and affordances. Second, it focuses on a specific case study, that is Michael Psellos’ funeral oration for his daughter Styliane (1054), who died of smallpox at the age of 9 years old. The paper sheds light on how affective affordances of an object contribute to the evocation of being moved in literary texts, working within and affecting narrative patterns. While building on the experience of ethical and spiritual principles clearly recognizable by the audience, such affordances point toward the activation of broader core values.</p
Clawing Rhetoric Back: Humor and Polemic in Tzetzes’ Hexameters on the Historiai
Full text linkThis paper offers the first literary-historical analysis of the book epigram in hexameters sealing the second recension of John Tzetzes’ Historiai. The book epigram belongs to a corpus of paratexts that, despite being edited by Giovanni Pietro Leone half a century ago, have received barely any attention. And yet, as we argue, they are crucial to understand how Tzetzes positioned the Historiai within his oeuvre, offering at the same time striking insights into the intellectual scene of 12th-century Constantinople. The hexametric book epigram, in particular, provides a key to read through the generic and rhetorical conventions of the Historiai, allowing the readers to “crack” their code and stressing the importance of humor and irony to read through Tzetzes’ own idiosyncratic expressive modules
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