Download PDF | Teresa Shawcross, Ida Toth (eds.) Reading In The Byzantine Empire And Beyond Cambridge University Press ( 2018).

 Download PDF | Teresa Shawcross, Ida Toth (eds.) Reading In The Byzantine Empire And Beyond Cambridge University Press ( 2018).

746 Pages

Offering a comprehensive introduction to the history of books, readers and reading in the Byzantine Empire and its sphere of influence, this volume addresses a paradox. Advanced literacy was rare among imperial citizens, being restricted by gender and class. Yet the state’s economic, religious and political institutions insisted on the fundamental importance of the written record. Starting from the materiality of codices, documents and inscriptions, the volume’s contributors draw attention to the evidence for a range of interactions with texts. They examine the role of authors, compilers and scribes. They look at practices such as the close perusal of texts in order to produce excerpts, notes, commentaries and editions. But they also analyse the social implications of the constant intersection of writing with both image and speech. Showcasing current methodological approaches, this collection of essays aims to place a discussion of Byzantium within the mainstream of medieval textual studies.

TERESA SHAWCROSS is Associate Professor of History and Hellenic Studies at Princeton University. Interested in the pre-modern book, she has studied the materiality of manuscripts, the role of authors, translators and scribes, and the interplay between literacy and orality. Publications include: The Chronicle of Morea: Historiography in Crusader Greece (2009).

IDA TOTH is Senior Instructor and Lecturer, and Research Fellow at Oxford University. She convenes graduate courses in Medieval Latin, Byzantine Greek and Byzantine Epigraphy. She has published on inscriptional culture and court rhetoric, and on the transmission of the Life of Aesop and the Book of Syntipas the Philosopher.

Contributors

MICHAEL ANGOLD is Professor Emeritus of Byzantine History at the University of Edinburgh.

MARINA BAZZANI is Lector in Greek and Latin at Oxford University. Her main interest is Byzantine literature, especially poetry of the middle and late periods. Her research has focused on the presence of autobiographical elements in poetic texts, and on textual and linguistic analysis. She is currently working on the poems of Manuel Philes.

RODERICK BEATON is Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature at King’s College London. He has published widely on Greek literature and culture from the twelfth century to the present. His books include The Medieval Greek Romance (1989, 2nd edition. 1996).

ALESSANDRA BUCOSSI is Research and Teaching Fellow and Principal Investigator of the research project The Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries as Forerunners of a United and Divided Europe at Universita Ca’ Foscari, Venice. She is the editor of the editio princeps of the Sacrum Armamentarium by Andronikos Kamateros for the Corpus Christianorum Series Graeca (2014).

JOHN DurFrFy is the Emeritus Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Byzantine Philology and Literature at Harvard University. His revised text and English translation of the homilies of Sophronius of Jerusalem is forthcoming in the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library series.

PETER FRANKOPAN is Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research at Oxford University and Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford. He works on the history of the Byzantine Empire, Russia, the Middle East, Iran and Central Asia. His most recent book is The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (2015).

NIELS GAUL is A. G. Leventis Professor of Byzantine Studies at the University of Edinburgh. His publications include Thomas Magistros und die spitbyzantinische Sophistik. Studien zum Humanismus urbaner Eliten in der friihen Palaiologenzeit (2011) and, edited jointly with Averil Cameron, Dialogues and Debates from Late Antiquity to Late Byzantium (2017).

TIM GREENWOOD is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mediaeval History at the University of St Andrews. He has published widely on the political, social and cultural history of late antique and medieval Armenia. He has recently completed a translation and commentary on the eleventh-century Universal History by Step‘anos Tarénec‘i’ (Stephen of Tardn) (2017).

DAVID M. GWYNN is Reader in Ancient and Late Antique History at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of a number of recent books, including Athanasius of Alexandria: Bishop, Theologian, Ascetic, Father (2012) and Christianity in the Later Roman Empire: A Sourcebook (2014).

FIONA K. HAARER teaches at King’s College London. Her work covers the history, literature, and culture of the fifth-sixth centuries and she has published a monograph, The Emperor Anastasius I: Politics and Empire in the late Roman World (2006).

JAMES HOWARD-JOHNSTON was University Lecturer in Byzantine Studies at the University of Oxford (1971-2009). He is an emeritus fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. His publications include Witnesses to a World Crisis: Historians and Histories of the Middle East in the Seventh Century (2010).

LIZ JAMES is Professor of Art History at the University of Sussex.

MARJOLIJNE C. JANSSEN is Research Associate at the Grammar of Medieval Greek Project at Cambridge University.

ELIZABETH JEFFREYS is Emeritus Bywater and Sotheby Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language and Literature in the University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of Exeter College.

MICHAEL JEFFREYS was successively Lecturer, Senior Lecturer and Sir Nicholas Laurantus Professor of Modern Greek in Sydney University from 1976 to 2000.

JOHANNES KODER is Professor Emeritus of the University of Vienna and a Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. His fields of research include: Byzantine monasticism and ecclesiastical hymnography, issues surrounding historical geography and identity, and the culture of everyday life. His last publication was Die Byzantiner: Kultur und Alltag im Mittelalter (2016).

MAJA KOMINKO works for the philanthropic foundation Arcadia and is an independent scholar. Her publications include The World of Kosmas: Illustrated Byzantine Codices of the Christian Topography (2013).

MARC D, LAUXTERMANN is Bywater and Sotheby Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language and Literature in the University of Oxford and Fellow of Exeter College.

PAUL MAGDALINO is Emeritus Professor of Byzantine History at the University of St Andrews. He has published on many aspects of Byzantine history and literature from the sixth to the fourteenth centuries. His special interests have included the twelfth century, the city of Constantinople, prophecy and astrology. He recently edited, with Nevra Necipoglu, Trade in Byzantium (2016).

ULRICH MOENNIG is Professor for Byzantine Studies and Modern Greek Philology at the University of Hamburg. He wrote a monograph on a late Byzantine version of the Alexander Romance (1992) and is the editor of two late Byzantine fictional texts: The Tale of Alexander and Semiramis (2004) and The Tale of the Hero Donkey (2009).

MARGARET MULLETT is Professor emerita of Byzantine Studies at Queen’s University Belfast and Director of Byzantine Studies emerita at Dumbarton Oaks. She is currently Visiting Professor of Byzantine Greek at the University of Uppsala.

TASSOS PAPACOSTAS is Lecturer in Byzantine material culture at King’s College London. His current work focuses on archaeology and architecture from late antiquity to the early modern period, primarily on Cyprus. Recent publications include Jdentity/Identities in Late Medieval Cyprus. Papers Given at the ICS Byzantine Colloquium, London 13-14 June 2011 (2014), edited with Guillaume Saint-Guillain.

MANOLIS PAPATHOMOPOULOS (1930-2011) was Professor of Classical Philology at Ioannina University. He was the editor of many classical and Byzantine texts, including Antoninus Liberalis’ Metamorphoses, the Life of Aesop, Oppian’s Cynegetica, Planudes’ translations of Augustine, On the Trinity and Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, as well as the anonymous War of Troy (with Elizabeth Jeffreys). 

MANOLIS S. PATEDAKIS is Assistant Professor in Byzantine Philology at the University of Crete. His special interests focus on epigraphy and manuscript culture from medieval and early modern Crete, and Symeon the New Theologian. His publications include several editions of Greek literary texts and inscriptions, including of the writings of Patriarch Athanasios of Constantinople.

GUNTER PRINZING is Emeritus Professor fiir Byzantinistik am Historischen Seminar at the University of Mainz. His publications include the edition of Demetrii Chomateni Ponemata Diaphora (2002).

PANAGIOTIS ROILOS is the George Seferis Professor of Modern Greek Studies and of Comparative Literature at Harvard. His publications include Towards a Ritual Poetics (with Dimitrios Yatromanolakis); Amphoteroglossia: A Poetics of the Twelfth-century Medieval Greek Novel; and C. P. Cavafy: The Economics of Metonymy. He is currently completing a book entitled Byzantine Imaginaries: A Cognitive Anthropology of Medieval Greek Phantasia.

JUDITH R. RYDER is General Editor of the Liverpool University Press series Translated Texts for Byzantinists. After a degree in theology and postgraduate work leading to a doctorate in Byzantine Studies in Oxford, she was a researcher on the Prosopography of the Byzantine World and Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford.

TERESA SHAWCROSS is Associate Professor of History and Hellenic Studies at Princeton University. Interested in the pre-modern book, she has written on the materiality of manuscripts, on the role of authors, translators and scribes, and on the interplay between literacy and orality. Her publications include The Chronicle of Morea: Historiography in Crusader Greece (2009). She is currently completing a study of the ideas and practices of empire — and its alternatives — during the late medieval

period.

JONATHAN SHEPARD was University Lecturer in Russian History at the University of Cambridge. Co-author with Simon Franklin of The Emergence of Rus (1996), his edited volumes include The Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire (2008) and Byzantium and the Viking World (co-edited with Fedir Androshchuk and Monica White, 2016).

DIMITRIOS SKREKAS is Research Associate at the University of Oxford, where he is completing a catalogue of the Holkham Hall Collection of Greek Manuscripts at the Bodleian Library. He has published on Byzantine prosopography and hymnography. His doctoral dissertation on the Three lambic Canons attributed to John of Damascus is under revision for publication.

IDA TOTH holds the post of Senior Instructor and Lecturer and Research Fellow at Oxford University, where she convenes graduate courses in Medieval Latin, Byzantine Greek, and Byzantine Epigraphy. She has published on late Byzantine imperial orations, on the medieval Greek and Slavonic transmission of wisdom literature, and on Byzantine inscriptional traditions in the seventh, eleventh and thirteenth centuries.

ERICH TRAPP pursued classical and Byzantine studies at the University of Vienna and obtained his doctorate with a dissertation on Manuel II Palaiologos’ Dialogue with a Persian. He was Lecturer for Byzantine Studies at the University of Vienna, and subsequently Professor at the University of Bonn. Now emeritus, he continues his lexicographical work as an honorary member of the Institute for Medieval Studies at the Austrian Academy.

Preface

With these lines at the end of his preface, a fourteenth-century chronicler imagines the fate of his work. There will be those who will pick up the book for themselves and peruse it. But also those who will gather together to listen to its contents, which will be read either by the author himself or by another reader who assumes the authorial voice. At the heart of this dual reception lies a paradox. As was true throughout the pre-modern world, possession of an advanced level of literacy was extremely rare in the Byzantine Empire. Only a handful of people were expected to attain higher education. Books, due to the materials and labour involved, were prohibitively expensive. Moreover, deciphering texts from handwritten manuscripts, despite the aid provided by the transition to the codex and presence of rubrics and marginal symbols, remained a demanding business. Even so, this was a society that laid great store by the written word.

It might be objected that ours is a distorted image of the past. After all, our sources reflect the truth of the aphorism scripta manent. Yet it is clear that medieval religion, government, and the economy all demanded of imperial citizens that they participate to the best of their ability —and according to the expectations of their class and gender — in a literate culture. Their Christian faith was based on the authority of revealed Scripture. The grant of land, assessment of taxes, and deliberation of court cases all involved the issuing of documents. The value of coins was meant to be guaranteed by their inscriptions. In these and other contexts, the written word was always a living thing: generative and transactional, it shaped individuals and bound them together in communities. Texts were authored, of course. But they were also copied and modified, as well as translated and transposed across languages and into other media. And above all they were read — frequently although by no means exclusively aloud, whether in a private or public setting. Imperial orations, where a complex relationship exists between what was delivered at court and what has been transmitted in manuscript form, are a case in point; so too are vernacular epic and romance. If we are to understand how Byzantines interacted with writing, we need to address questions of materiality and look for traces of transmission and circulation with the performative aspect of textuality kept firmly in mind.

The present volume showcases a range of critical approaches to the study of books, readers and reading. A work of this size and scope represents a protracted endeavour that accumulates many debts. The editors are deeply beholden to the contributors for their commitment to the project, and their willingness to bring to bear their collective expertise on the topic it treats. We are also grateful to Joshua Birk, Emmanuel Bourbouhakis, Lorenzo Calvelli, Averil Cameron, Surekha Davies, Charalambos Dendrinos, Lawrence Douglas, Joe Ellis and Ellen Wilkins-Ellis, Stella Frigerio-Zeniou, Sharon Gerstel, Dimitris Gondicas, Tony Grafton, Geoffrey Greatrex, Molly Greene, David Gwynn, John Haldon, Judith Herrin, David Holton, Ruth Macrides, Fred McGinness, Leonora Neville, Paolo Odorico, Georgios Ploumidis, Charlotte Roueché, Carole Straw, and Christopher van den Berg for their help and encouragement, as well as to the anonymous readers and peer reviewers of both the individual chapters and the complete manuscript for their careful feedback. Sheila Marie Flaherty-Jones, Jonathan Martin, Hollis Shaul, Douglas Whalin, and most especially Randall Pippenger gave vital technical assistance. Amherst College, Mount Holyoke College, Oxford University, and Princeton University provided us with institutional homes and financial support. Our particular thanks go to Michael Sharp and Cambridge University Press for making publication possible. And, as always, to our families — for being there.

Finally, we should like to dedicate this book to two scholars who have made an unparalleled contribution to our knowledge of Byzantium’s literary culture: Elizabeth and Michael Jeffreys. Drawing our attention to the interplay between the written and the oral, the Jeffreys have shone a spotlight on previously ignored figures: the folk singer, the preacher, the begging poet, the foreigner and the female patron. They have been staunch advocates for the adoption of editorial practices and the creation of databases that harness the potential of evolving technological platforms and allow us better to visualise the multiple layers of our evidence. In retirement, they continue to be trailblazers, with recent publications including: E. M. Jeffreys, trans., Four Byzantine Novels, Translated with Notes (2012) and M. J. Jeffreys and M. D. Lauxtermann, The Letters of Michael Psellos: Cultural Networks and Historical Realities (2017).

A Festschrift has already been published in the Southern Hemisphere: Basileia: Essays on Imperium and Culture in Honour of E. M. and M. J. Jeffreys, ed. G. Nathan and L. Garland (2011). Our new volume brings together a number of colleagues and students of the Jeffreys’ from the Northern Hemisphere, notably from Great Britain. With it, the editors and contributors together offer a token of their deep gratitude for the intellectual guidance and personal friendship they have been so unstintingly given.

Finished on 27th December: Feast day of the patron saint of authors, publishers, and parchment makers. 

INTRODUCTION I

Byzantium: a Bookish World

Teresa Shawcross

Among the works composed by Photios — the captain of the guard, ambassador and chief imperial secretary who served two terms as patriarch under the emperors Michael III and Basil I — is one known as the Myriobiblos (the “Myriad Books’) or Bibliotheca (the ‘Library’)." A huge endeavour, it consisted of around 279 reviews of varying length that summarised the content of a text or group of texts, and provided remarks on the style as well as biographical details of the authors. Assuming knowledge of works that were considered canonical and therefore used as textbooks, Photios explicitly excluded these from discussion. Instead, his reviews represented forays further afield, pointing to the voracious breadth of his interests. Theological writings dominated, as one would expect of an ecclesiastic, but secular works of greater or lesser antiquity, including a number of considerable rarity, were not neglected: alongside reviews of philosophical disquisitions, histories, biographies, novels, and poems there are ones of scientific compendia such as lexica, medical treatises, herbals, and agricultural manuals. The quality of the collections to which Photios had access is evident from the fact that he often constitutes our fullest or indeed only source for an ancient text. In many instances, he consulted multiple versions, making an effort to seek out reliable, old manuscripts. Where he could secure access to only a fragmentary copy of a particular work, or had to abandon reading it before he had finished, he would leave space at the end of his draft review in the hope he could return to the task later. There were occasions, too, when he appears to have produced a preliminary evaluation based solely on others’ excerpts and summaries. In some cases at least, he explicitly acknowledged that he had not yet managed to find or read the text in question.

To be sure, Photios’ is a striking work that offers an unrivalled insight into the books available to one individual as well as the approach he took when reading them. The familiarity and engagement with books to which it attests should be considered an extreme, but nonetheless representative, example of a broader tendency among those within the Byzantine Empire’s sphere of influence. Institutional and personal libraries played a significant role in the accumulation of knowledge and information within society. Inventories produced during surveys of property together with other records (such as notes of shelfmarks) provide us with snapshots of the contents of particular manuscript collections at specific moments, while monograms and other marks of ownership allow us to reconstruct these collections’ materiality.’ Outside Constantinople, some 960 and 330 books respectively have so far been associated with the monastic libraries of the Great Lavra on Mount Athos and of St John on Patmos, and some 150 with the private library of Constantine Laskaris in Messenia.* When Nikephoros Moschopoulos, the titular metropolitan of Crete, moved to Mistra, he may have decided to take with him as many as a couple of hundred volumes, for he travelled with four horseloads of books.’ Eustathios Boilas, a retired military commander who had received a land grant in the remote and recently annexed province of Tayk, assembled 80 books, which he then housed in the monastery he founded on his estate, while Gregory Pakourianos donated 30 books to his monastic foundation near Plovdiv in Bulgaria.°

These numbers are likely to be the tip of the iceberg: anecdotal evidence indicates that the collections attached to the palace, patriarchate, institutions of higher learning and monasteries in the imperial capital were far larger, although today their holdings cannot be reconstructed with any degree of accuracy. Describing the library he had refounded at the Chora Monastery, Theodore Metochites claimed he had made it ‘a treasury’ of ‘countless books’ of various sorts, including not only books ‘of our Wisdom / most Divine, which are greatly useful’, but also books ‘of the Hellenic wisdom that is beyond the gates, / almost as numerous’.” While the declaration that in 1453 there had been 120,000 tomes in Constantinople must be an exaggeration, it reflects the sense of one contemporary collector and dealer that very substantial libraries had been in existence prior to the city’s sack by the Ottomans.* Some 60,000 manuscripts in Greek alone have survived down to our day, to which should be added those in Armenian, Arabic, Syriac, Georgian, Latin, and other languages current in the empire.”

Although particular books might be kept under lock and key, their perusal strictly forbidden, most were not merely collected and deposited, but also consumed. One visitor described a small space at the entrance to the imperial palace in such a way as to suggest that manuscripts were considered part of the ordinary contents of the complex. The space, which was a kind of /oggia, roofed but open on the sides to the elements, was located on the ground floor and was easily accessible. It was furnished with stone tables and benches and had ‘many books and ancient writings and histories and, next to them, gaming boards — for the emperor’s dwelling is always well supplied’. The founding abbot of the Stoudios monastery, Theodore, similarly indicated in the rule for his community that reading was a normal occupation: ‘on days when we perform no physical labour the librarian bangs a gong once, the brothers gather at the place where books are kept and each takes one, reading it until late’."° In addition to being available for consultation like this on site, volumes could also circulate, sometimes widely. They might be lost as a result of private theft, shipwreck, or even the plundering activities of a local mob or — as was the case with the library of the metropolitan of Athens, Michael Choniates — a foreign army. To discourage this, notices of ownership placed in books were frequently accompanied by curses against those contemplating theft or vandalism, while the depredations that still occurred were followed by attempts to seek redress and recover the property.'* More often, however, collections were disseminated because people actively decided to share the material in their possession with others. The monastery of Patmos, for example, made a list of loans to institutions (fifteen items) as well as to individual monks and laypeople (nineteen items) located across a radius of several hundred miles. **

This introductory chapter explores the relationship those who lived within the Byzantine Empire — or came within its ambit — had with books and other objects inscribed with the written word. Tempering the evidence from prescriptive sources with that gleaned from surviving examples of practice, it seeks to identify some of the defining characteristics of textual production, collection, circulation, and, above all, consumption. In addition to reconstructing the ways in which individuals could engage with and experience the process of reading, it considers the institutional framework that rendered possible the formation of a readership in the first place. And it draws attention to the extent and composition of that readership. As we shall see, the acquisition of the skill of literacy remained the prerogative of a minority whose boundaries were defined by gender, class and location. This does not mean, however, that we should ignore the tremendous potency of literate culture in determining forms of solidarity that cut across social stratification. Interactions of a religious and political nature habitually emphasised the inclusionary role of texts, whose message was rendered accessible to the illiterate and transmitted to them through visual representation and oral performance.

How Should One Read?

Books, of course, could cause disappointment and frustration. The teacher John Tzetzes, who had a rather high opinion of his own interpretative capabilities, frequently disagreed with the views expressed in the scholia that accompanied the works he was studying, and in the margins scribbled insults against the ‘ignorant buffoons’ who had added ‘dross’ to what was valuable; at times, he even railed against the content of the works themselves.’ One late medieval reader of a late antique illustrated manuscript of a herbal struggled to make out the old-fashioned majuscule script employed in the labels of the plants and decided for ease of reference to write the names again at the tops of pages in his own hand. Another took a history to task for having promised a narrative written in simple prose yet gone on to use so convoluted a style it gave the reader vertigo and hindered comprehension.'* An even more acute cry of despair was penned by the mathematician John Chortasmenos next to a specific number problem in a copy of Diophantus’ Avithmetica: ‘Diophantus, may your soul rot in Hell because of the difficulty of the other theorems of yours, and in particular of the present theorem!’. We should feel some measure of sympathy, for the passage that elicited this exclamation was almost certainly the very one from which is derived the theorem, formulated by Pierre de Fermat in 1637 but not proven until 1994 by Andrew Wiles, that is considered to represent the most difficult mathematical problem of all, attracting the largest number of unsuccessful proofs.'”

Mostly, however, books were seen as a source of gratification. If epistolographic exchanges allowed people in different locations to stay in contact with one another, books were the means by which an even more pronounced form of separation, caused by time, could be surmounted. They made it possible to commune not only with the living, but also with those long dead.*® Bishop Basil the Lesser related that in reading the homilies of Gregory of Nazianzos he felt it was as if he were in the presence of the man himself and could benefit from his personal companionship.'” The courtier Michael Psellos expressed his reaction to Gregory’s work in even less moderate language, describing himself as having undergone a process of seduction after which he was overcome by an ecstasy similar to the transports produced during an act of love-making to which one has willingly surrendered oneself: ‘I am taken over, in an inexpressible way, by the beauty and grace of his [Gregory’s] eloquence ... I feel vanquished by the rosaries of the burgeoning terms and abase myself to the sensations they create in me ... I embrace and kiss the one who has ravished me in this way.’** Again and again, individuals commenting on the effect the writings of a particular author had scribbled expressions of delight in the margins, such as: ‘Oh! Libanius, what a pleasure to read you!’"?

Reading was considered capable of having an effect resembling that of the coolness of water or the sweetness of honey on a parched or sick palate.*° But for it to comfort and sustain in this way, the act needed to be carried out in an appropriate fashion. On the most basic level, readers were enjoined to concentrate fully on the text in front of them, denying themselves the diversion of glancing up or speaking to others while reading.*’ A lazy person, it was explained, is easily distracted and turns his gaze ‘away from the book and fixes it on the ceiling’ or, flicking through ‘to see how much is left for him to finish’, counts the pages and — assessing the ampleness of the images and other decoration, and the size of the writing — even calculates the lines. A fellow of this sort, who is bored and given to yawning, believes in his heart of hearts that the best use for a volume is as a pillow on which he can lay his head as he nods off; consequently, the profit he draws from texts is less than that of someone who exercises proper self-discipline.** But a more subtle though equally detrimental kind of behaviour was that of approaching texts with an eye to style over substance.*’ Those who do not know how to read in order to gain serious knowledge ‘of places, nations, and actions’ and thus attain familiarity with the ‘treasures of learned writings of all types’ are to be pitied as having been duped by the educational methods of charlatans who, though they pretend to impart learning, fail to do so and instead peddle figures and tropes in such a way as to lose their students in ‘a tortuous labyrinth’ of rhetoric. **

True readers, resisting the gratuitous immersion in linguistic pyrotechnics that accompanies ‘reading for its own sake’, should turn to books in order to sharpen and train the intellect, and attain the ability not only to think perceptively and profoundly but also to express their thoughts adequately and communicate them clearly and effectively to others.*> To this end, they needed to undertake a combination of an intensive (epimeles) reading — what we would call close reading — of each text during which they paid careful attention to the glosses and other apparatus that accompanied it, with an extensive (entribes) reading of a range of texts through which they covered a large amount of ground in order to ‘learn a lot’.*° The pages of manuscripts allow us to trace how actual individuals approached this double task. Arethas, bishop of Caesarea, crammed the margins of his copy of Aristotle’s Organon with jottings of various types, while Tzetzes added a copious series of notes in his copy of the History of the Peloponnesian War of Thucydides, addressing questions of orthography, grammar, syntax, as well as clarifying chronology and commentating on ancient culture and customs.*’ Some readers, of course, went beyond mere annotation, copying out excerpts or indeed whole works.*® Manuscripts written in a rapid, idiosyncratic hand with abundant abbreviations, and combining a main text with a heavy apparatus of notes, represent the working copies of scholars who intended to use them as part of a programme of private study, or as preparation for teaching. Sometimes readers worked in groups and divided the labour between them. Seventeen different hands, for example, contributed to the copying and interpretation of a miscellany of astronomical, geographical, and mathematical texts.”

More active intervention on the part of the readers resulted in editions aiming to restore or improve upon an original through the collation of multiple sources; or paraphrases or adaptations; or even wholly new works.*°

In the case of the philosopher George Gemistos Plethon, it is possible to trace the complete range of these activities, from his marginal notes in manuscripts, to his excerpts and summaries of material, to his editions and commentaries, and, finally, his own original compositions, some of which, such as the Book of Laws, were considerable in extent. A detailed picture can be reconstructed not only of Plethon’s own working method, but also of the extent of its influence on students of his such as Laonikos Chalkokondyles.*" In most instances, however, the evidence is more indirect. Much of what is known about the reading habits of Byzantines comes from their output as authors who, in discussing, quoting or even tacitly including in their own writings elements from works that had in some way affected their cast of thought or style, reveal the existence of sometimes very elaborate intertextual relationships.’** While the abbess Kassia has — unlike her contemporary, Photios — left us no autobiographical notes of her readings, the allusions in her poems suggest knowledge of a wide range of texts.”

Some readers who turned their hand to writing can be shown to have conceived of their intellectual projects on a notably grand scale. They arranged for copies of the great canonical works, which they claimed had acted as their inspiration, to be purchased and rebranded or, even better, to be produced from scratch according to a set design with regard to format and layout.’* They also arranged for their own compositions to be issued according to the same specifications, doubtless hoping that this uniformity in outward garb would mean that some of the credentials of more august writings would rub off, aiding the transmission of what was contemporary alongside what was classic. Such was the case with Theodore Metochites, who entrusted the entire contents of his library, including not only the copies of others’ works he had assembled but also his own original writings, to a favourite student, Nikephoros Gregoras, whom he appointed as his literary executor.*’ Explaining that the careful curating of the collection as a whole had as its underlying objective the preservation of its creator's compositions, Metochites indicated that these ‘offspring’ of his ‘soul’ needed most particularly to survive so that they could constitute his ‘monument’ for subsequent ‘generations of mortals’, providing him posthumously with ‘immortal glory’ and ‘renown’. He urged the younger man to dedicate himself to the preservation of his teacher’s finished works and drafts from “all harm’ so as to ensure that they stood the greatest chance of remaining intact until ‘the end of time’.*°

Acquiring Literacy

To become educated was to go ‘dancing with rhetoricians in the gardens of the Muses’.*’ Instructors at all levels acted as cultural guardians and facilitators. ‘I am prepared to answer all your questions’, Psellos told his class, ‘and I have opened doors to the sciences and all the arts’.>* Under professional guidance, students would be exposed to a variety of texts. During these encounters, they could not but become aware of the weight of tradition. It was a humbling experience, but not necessarily one meant to discourage them to the extent that they would give up on the possibility of developing a voice of their own. Though Manuel Palaiologos acknowledged ‘if it could be made a law that because there are superior authors the inferior authors should remain silent, why then there should not be one person among the present generation who would dare open his mouth in view of the clear pre-eminence of the ancients’, he nonetheless went on to claim that such muteness would in fact ‘be a supremely bad thing’ (kakiston).’? Of course, students were to delve deep into vocabulary and syntax in order to understand the writings they had inherited from the past; but, beyond that, they were to seek out models that they could then imitate not mechanically, but for a purpose. Ultimately, their aim was to achieve a fluent familiarity with literary antecedents that would enrich their own command of language, allowing them to deploy a range of registers: from the refined Atticism or the more stolid koine gleaned from books, to the pungent colloquialisms of their own times — depending upon the context and desired effect. This meant communicating by using an allusive style while at the same time, to the best of their capacity, making it new.*°

When their offspring were sufficiently grown, good parents were supposed to discourage them from the behaviour associated with toddlers — described as chanting nursery rhymes in a singsong voice and running about naked — and send them to ‘pedagogues’ or ‘if you prefer, teachers’.*' While an exceptionally gifted child might be entrusted to a schoolmaster at the tender age of five, and prefer studying over playing, most would begin when they were between six and eight years old. For those whose families were able to afford it, personal tuition was available; at the other end of the spectrum, impecunious orphans might receive instruction from charitable institutions. The majority, however, attended elementary schools as feepaying pupils. Privately run and directed by a grammatistes, these taught the introductory skills of literacy. Beginning with the recitation of the name of all the letters in alphabetical order, pupils would first learn to recognise the shape of each letter, and then to pronounce and copy it out on a wooden tablet. From there, they would progress to syllables, words, and eventually whole phrases.**

After this stage, which typically took four to six years, lasting until the age of ten or twelve, pupils might continue with a grammatikos who taught the enkyklios paideia or liberal arts with a focus on grammar. Here, lessons took the form of line-by-line reading and commentary (epimerismoi), supplemented by word-puzzles with deliberate errors which the student had to correct, and by the drafting of short analytical notes (schediographia).*’ In some schools, where both advanced elementary and intermediate education were carried out under the same roof, the possibility existed for the study under the grammatikos of rhetoric in the form of the practice of ‘preliminary exercises’ (progymnasmata) on a variety of themes that encouraged pupils to use their knowledge and imagination to tell stories, express opinions, and moralise (e.g. “The history of Atlantis’; “What words might Pasiphaé have said when in love with the bull’; “What words might Hades have said upon witnessing Lazarus rise from the dead after four days’; ‘Doing good always gives rise to gratitude’). Alternatively, teenagers might come under the more expert instruction of a rhetor in order to learn composition and oratory.**

Some schoolteachers had the expertise to round off their instruction by inducting their more advanced pupils into the basics of philosophy, mathematics and the sciences. For the most part, however, these disciplines were pursued at centres of higher learning and were the preserve of students who had already attained their late teens or were in their early twenties.*” The Patriarchal School, while providing grounding in influential ancient authors, mainly focused on the forms of exegesis and religious reasoning considered to have superseded pagan learning.*° The Imperial School of Philosophy — organised around charismatic members of the faculty who disputed with one another and lectured until the members of the audience ‘stopped taking notes and were so overwhelmed with fatigue they could not concentrate’ — was characterised by a ferocious climate of intellectual competition that encouraged individual professors to issue statements to their students in which they disparaged the instruction provided by opponents and insisted on the superiority of their own classes: ‘Should there have been anyone able to give a better explanation than I of any of the things I have discussed, you might have directed yourselves to him. But, until such an individual should present himself, you are to pay attention to my teaching!’*” Despite a partial reliance on debate as a means of instruction, the Imperial School of Law offered rather more sober training in jurisprudence and legal practice.**

The emergence of such institutions notwithstanding, we should imagine higher education for the most part not as conforming to a rigid framework, but rather as a more fluid set-up, in which those avid for learning were attracted by the reputation of scholars, in turn creating a demand for classes. Because there was room for experimentation with the curriculum and also because some professors offered courses in more than one speciality, disciplinary boundaries often became blurred. Nor, for that matter, should every person who was described as a ‘teacher’ (didaskalos) be assumed to have been a professor, since individuals granted a remit to interpret and preach religious dogma, as well as to perform specific pastoral duties, were sometimes also designated in this fashion.*”

Educational Asymmetries

Describing the instructional programme at the School of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople, the deacon Nicholas Mesarites noted that teachers referring to ‘books spread open’ explained the ‘preparatory steps’ to beginners who could not themselves yet read. As these beginners acquired skill in reading, he added, they would pore over their lessons continuously and pace ‘up and down through the porticoed enclosure’ in order to memorise them; having succeeded, they would then carry ‘their papers under their arms’ and recite ‘what is written in them’. Those who were more advanced studied the rudiments of composition by attempting to rehearse ‘problems completely from the beginning’. The most qualified of all employed the full resources of their training in order to weave with ease ‘webs of phrases’.*°

The question, however, was not just that of progressing through the curriculum, but also of being granted entry to it in the first place. Access did not depend on ability, but was unevenly distributed according to an individual’s location, social background, and, above all, gender. Girls were utterly excluded from the classroom. This bias was underscored in the twelfth century by Tzetzes’ scathing attack on a woman who, eager to accede to the study of grammar, was trying her hand at a series of literary exercises (‘Instead of weaving you take up a tome, / A quill instead of a shuttle!’). The poet declared that the fairer sex should realise its feebler capacities could not cope with the challenges posed by books and restrict itself to the role traditionally assigned to it of homemaker and childbearer:

O, woman!

What do you think you are up to? I am amazed at these books! You should return to your distaff and to the drawing of thread! Go ply the spindle! Knit together your warps and wefts!

Letters and learning are appropriate to men.

And he concluded by condescendingly quoting a tag, which he explained, was taken from no less an authority than one of the main representatives of the male literary canon: “Jt is for man, and woman should not want it.”

 Speaking thus the good Aeschylus persuades you.’ His point was that women should not have the temerity to wish to learn to read, but rather should unquestioningly accept the authority of men who had the twin prerogative of interpreting the classics and applying their precepts.”*

The occasional female did not surrender to such admonishments and acquired an education in defiance of society’ behavioural norms. Examples included Tzetzes’ own contemporaries Anna Komnene and Eirene the Sebastokratorissa: the one was Emperor John II’s elder sister, who penned the Alexiad, a notable historical work produced within the empire, and the other was his sister-in-law, who studied grammar and rhetoric, and whose knowledge of epic, history, oratory and other genres made her a leading intellectual light.** But these princesses were very much the exception. The author of Komnene’s funeral elegy noted that she had been allowed to have tutors and study rhetoric, philosophy and all the sciences, including medicine; but he added that, despite her passion for reading from a young age, she had been granted access to such instruction only after a long period, during which — because her parents were worried about the danger of exposing her to books — she had had to read the texts she was attracted to secretly, like a young maiden looking ‘with furtive eyes’ through a keyhole at the man intended to be betrothed to her.”’ The metaphor reflects the fact aristocratic girls were groomed as future wives and, if they were permitted to learn letters at all, generally were taught in the confines of their homes by their mothers, who themselves could pass on only the rudiments.

Despite having had a predisposition for learning, the mother and daughter of one the most prominent Byzantine intellectuals, Psellos, were limited to the acquisition of sufficient letters to read the psalter and parse a few other simple religious texts. The elder, Theodote, was said to have suffered ‘anguish’ because as a woman she could not study freely: trained in the ‘working of the loom’, she had to acquire the ‘basic principles of letters’ on her own and ‘in secret’. Brought up more liberally, the younger, Styliane, was allowed to divide her days between practising ‘the careful labours of the loom’ and learning ‘her letters’ with teachers, but even so her father’s plans for her do not appear to have included the continuation of her lessons after she had reached the marriageable age of puberty.’* Indeed, the almost total illiteracy of women appears to have been the norm across all social strata: an analysis of women who wrote their names in contrast to those who made their mark in an indicative sample of documents relating to urban centres in Asia Minor shows that the latter represented 84 per cent in the thirteenth and 98 per cent in the fourteenth centuries.””

A large proportion of Byzantine boys, especially in the countryside, were also unschooled. Of the different educational establishments available within the empire, the most advanced were found uniquely in the imperial capital, while even elementary schools rarely existed outside major provincial cities and towns. There were almost no village schools. These inequalities in the distribution of opportunities for schooling resulted in the creation of a vast gulf between those men who knew how to read and write fluently enough to be able to compose in a suitably elevated style texts of an elaborately technical nature, and those who were merely able to draw their names in laborious fashion. Most did not even possess the latter skill. It is true that, according to a sample of documents mainly involving those belonging to the monastic profession, illiteracy in Macedonia decreased between the tenth and the fifteenth centuries from 36 per cent to o per cent. But a more mixed sample of ecclesiastics and laymen from Asia Minor indicates that during the thirteenth century 38 per cent in Smyrna and 77 per cent in Mantaia still could not sign their names.*° When men were called upon to act as witnesses, clerics, monks, local landed gentry, soldiers and burghers relatively often penned their own signature, while craftsmen and especially peasants were almost never able to do so.”

Portraits of emperors, dignitaries, and other males of substantial social status, fairly often showed their subjects holding books, scrolls or other texts. In the double frontispiece accompanying one theological work, the Dogmatic Panoply, Alexios | Komnenos, his hands covered by a liturgical cloth, was painted receiving a scroll containing Christian doctrine from the Church Fathers, and then offering up the exegetical text he commissioned to Christ, who blesses both him and it (Fig. 1.1); similarly, in the frontispiece to his History the chancellor Niketas Choniates was drawn scribbling away furiously, his hat pushed back from his brow.’* By contrast, the women shown perusing or creating texts tended to be outsiders and deviants, such as barbarian women of various stripes, including the queens not only of the Persians and Indians, but also of the mythical Amazons, who were portrayed in a copy of the Romance of Alexander receiving and sending letters (Figs 1.2-1.3).’? While a monumental palatine mosaic in Constantinople — of the emperor Basil I and his family — depicted not only the princes but also the princesses ‘holding books’, the image was considered unusual enough to require justification. The artist was said to have represented all the emperor’s offspring as educated in order to compensate for the fact their sire bore the stigma of having been raised illiterate.°° One has to wait until the early modern period to find a portrait of a well-nurtured young girl from the Greekspeaking world reading (Fig. 1.4).°" And certainly no ‘digger’ or ‘washerwoman’ was ever depicted taking respite from his or her labours, and finding solace in a book.®* It should be emphasised that manuscripts, because of the materials and labour involved in their production, were a commodity that was prohibitively expensive for the majority of the population. Ownership of, for example, a copy of the works of Plato that cost 8 gold nomismata for its parchment and 13 for its transcription, while well within the reach of someone of elevated rank who received an annual court stipend of 3,500 nomismata, was not easily contemplated by an entry-level administrator whose basic remuneration was set at 72 nomismata. It was inconceivable for a manual labourer earning 6-10 nomismata.°*

Yet even those without the advantages of a formal education or the financial means of purchasing books could have had contact with the written word. Seeking to define textuality, John Mauropous, bishop of Euchaita, described it as a bird whose hybrid nature combined the outward appearance of the swallow — in so far as ‘on the white of the parchment the black of the letters stood out’ — with the sound of a nightingale able to sing out with a ‘melodious voice’ that ‘enchants my ear’.°! Although silent reading was known, the oral rendition of texts remained widespread.°° Accustomed to reading particular types of works aloud even in solitude, the literate expected, through performances that involved declamation and improvisation, to transform the written into the spoken, facilitating reception by others.°° Thus, a verse chronicler envisaging the fate of his poem after publication emphasised its communication by aural means. He enjoined those who knew letters to take up the manuscript and read it, and those who were unlettered to form an audience:

if you are educated ... and are knowledgeable in matters of writing ... then take this and read it, and if, again, you are illiterate, then sit ... and listen.°”

The reception of texts could be further supplemented by the recourse to visual representation.°° A foreign princess, probably to be identified with the daughter of Louis VII of France, Agnés-Eirene, was the recipient of a manuscript consisting of only a few lines of text composed in the vernacular and copied using simple calligraphy, accompanied by a series of very large illustrations. Essentially a picture book, it was intended to introduce the young girl — who had recently been betrothed to Alexios II Komnenos, the heir to the imperial throne, and needed to be taught to fulfil the role of consort — to the world of court etiquette and ceremonial inhabited by her in-laws.°? Outside the confines of the palace, ordinary citizens who viewed the depictions of emperors on banners, boards and walls in the streets of the capital were expected to engage with formal iconographic features, interpreting the message correctly despite being unable to decipher the accompanying explanatory inscriptions. In the case of Andronikos I, who murdered Agnés-Eirene’s husband of a few months and took his place, they refused to play along and expressly offered alternative interpretations.’° More banally, even if the peasants working the fields could not themselves puzzle out the letters of the word ‘Limit’ (Horos) on a cylindrical boundary marker on Patmos, they were expected to understand the significance of the inscription and modify their conduct accordingly.”'

These complementary modes of communication through sound and image allowed the illiterate to be transformed, almost by proxy, into members of the literate class. Indeed, although the knowledge of how to read and write was distributed across society in a decidedly patchy manner, the insistence that everyone should be integrated — even if only symbolically — within a literate culture was a feature of the empire. It is no coincidence that, on his accession to the throne, the emperor Basil I, a former stable-hand, demonstrated his prowess as a ruler not only by setting out to rectify his own illiteracy upon obtaining access to the necessary resources, but also by promulgating a decree according to which calculations of taxes that were due — typically written out in fractions of the highest monetary denomination, the gold /yperpyron — were to be inscribed in ledgers in longhand and in capital letters so that everyone, including the simple folk (agroikoi), could read them. All those who were expected to fulfil fiscal obligations — and therefore possessed the status of free men and were eligible for imperial citizenship — had to be conceived of, if not as actual readers, at least as potential ones.”* Indicatively, although Theodore Metochites exhorted the monks of his monastery to have recourse to its library, he explained that the collection of books therein contained was not for them alone, but instead meant to represent a ‘great universal work of philanthropy, at the disposition of all mortals’. Acting in conscious imitation of God who, ‘rich in bounty, made the air for the common use of all men, as well as the earth and the water’, the donor granted use of the entirety of the library’s holdings without exception not solely to the ‘wealthy’, but also to the ‘very poor and needy’, so that ‘inexhaustible’ access would be ‘common to all’ (pankoinos).”’ The library was envisaged as a public foundation, irrespective of who actually graced its doors.

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