Download PDF | (Birmingham Byzantine and Ottoman Studies) Margaret Mullett - Theophylact of Ochrid_ Reading the Letters of a Byzantine Archbishop-Routledge (1997).
462 Pages
Birmingham Byzantine and Ottoman Monographs is a new series of studies devoted to all aspects of the history, culture and archaeology of the Byzantine and Ottoman worlds of the East Mediterranean region from the fifth to the twentieth century. It aims to provide a forum for the publication of work carried out by scholars while at the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham, or who are connected with the Centre and its research programmes.
About the volume
Few works exist in any language on Byzantine literature as literature and still fewer full-length studies of individual texts. This reading of the letter-collection (c.1090c.1100) of Theophylact of Ochrid employs a variety of approaches in order to characterise a work which is both a literary artefact in a long Greek tradition and the only trace of a complex network of friends, colleagues, patrons and clients within Byzantine Bulgaria and and also within the empire as a whole. These letters are acknowledged to be of great importance for local economic and ecclesiastical history, relations with the Slavs and the arrival of the First Crusade, but have not hitherto been studied as an example of Byzantine letter-writing. This volume is a first attempt to place an epistolary text in a succession of literary and historical contexts which allow it to reveal insights into the mentality of the Byzantine elite, the function of literature in Byzantine society and the status of utterances in rhetorical and autobiographical texts at the time of the revival of fiction in Byzantium.
About the author
Margaret Mullett graduated in Medieval History and Medieval Latin at the University of Bimingham in 1970 and then studied for her doctorate there with Anthony Bryer. She has written on literacy, patronage, genre and friendship in Byzantine society and has edited books on the classical tradition, Alexios I Komnenos, the Forty Martyrs and two on eleventh-century monasticism; she is currently working on the processes of Byzantine letter-exchange and on eleventhand twelfth-century literary society. From 1989 to 1996 she was Secretary of the Society for Promotion of Byzantine Studies. She was appointed to the Queen’s University of Belfast in 1974, and is now Senior Lecturer in Byzantine Studies, Director of the Evergetis Project and General Editor of Belfast Byzantine Texts and Translations. She is currently a British Academy Research Reader.
A NOTE ON USING THIS BOOK
The titles of (only) works which cited more than once in any chapter in the text, or are given in “The Collection’ or “The Network’ by short title may be found in full in the Bibliography, 409-424. References to people (including Theophylact), places and concepts are listed in the ‘Index’, 425-441. References to discussions throughout the book of individual letters of Theophylact are gathered in ‘The Collection,’ 291-346, under Gautier’s numbers. A concordance of numbering of the letters may be found as Table I, 385-386. Members of Theophylact’s network are identified by a bracketed number in bold; chapters 4.2 and 4.3, 178-222, with figs. 1-7, explain and illustrate the network; ‘The Network’, 347-381, lists the members. When referring to a letter of Theophylact, I have made it my normal practice as a point of principle (Demetrios, Peri Hermeneias, 124) to follow Gautier’s number with the name of the recipient. Space has not allowed me to do the same for other letter-collections, except where absolutely necessary. Placenames are transliterated in their most familiar form, or, where more than one form is familiar, in the form closest to Theophylact’s usage.
PREFACE
This book has been many books (a lyrical first draft, a ponderous thesis, a theoretical sketch) and each one has incurred many debts which cannot be counted here or ever repaid. It began as a Birmingham thesis and I am very proud that it now appears in a Birmingham series, yet another of the national Byzantine institutions that we owe to Anthony Bryer. Dumbarton Oaks awarded me a summer fellowship to turn it into a book; this gave me a blissful bookful summer in Irene Vaslef’s wonderful library and all that Washington friendship can provide: Marlene Chazan has followed Julia Warner’s example in making a point of turning fellows into friends. Nikos Oikonomides and John Nesbitt guided me through the labyrinth of seals and Susan Boyd and Stephen Zwirn did their best with a photograph of Theophylact’s. My family (Betty and Maurice, Michael and Leo) sacrificed two more summers to give me time with Theophylact, only one example of their constant generosity and consideration. For over twenty years the Queen’s University of Belfast has offered me a challenging post and constant distraction from my research, with compensating stimulus from generations of undergraduates, research students and teaching assistants, all of whom have taught me an enormous amount, and made me feel it was all worthwhile: Earl Collins and Damian Leeson, Dion Smythe and Anthony Kirby, Shaun Tougher and Barbara Hill, Liz James, Barbara Zeitler and Tony Eastmond, as well as the current Byzantine community, with friends who travel year after year (Lyn Rodley) or week after week (Sarah Ekdawi) to teach with us, and my colleague Bob Jordan who makes everything come right. I owe a great deal also to the medievalists at Queen’s (Judith Green, Evelyn Mullally, Tom McNeill, Bruce Campbell, Nicole Mezey, John Thompson and Marie-Thérése Flanagan) who have maintained my morale and set high standards, and to the wider circle of Hibernian Hellenists (George Huxley, John Dillon, Gerry Watson), who have always made room for Byzantium. Most of all I must thank my friends, the scattered Byzantinists in Manchester and St Andrews, London and Cambridge, Newcastle and Warwick, Minnesota and Melbourne, in particular Rosemary Morris (my oldest and ablest ally), Paul Magdalino and Ruth Macrides; they prove Momigliano wrong in his assertion that Byzantinists do not all read the same texts: these friends always know the text and passage I am talking about.
I have learned so much from so many people: Peter Brown, Alexander Kazhdan, Peter Megaw, but Bryer is my only inspiration, Robin Cormack my inscribed reader, and Michael Angold an ingenious devil’s advocate. Averil Cameron made me finish. John Smedley bullied and nursed the final text along, with his famous patience, and Ruth Peters was always there with extra rulings and encouragement, to which the providential patronage of the British Academy hastened my response.
Marie Taylor Davis and Tony Sheehan computerised me; Bryer and Rowena Loverance provided photographs; Diana (and Ken) Wardle organised illustrations (and saved me from many errors); Ben Willmore drew with skill and tact. Ruth Webb lent me her Bakhtin which provided a way of explaining (after the event) what I was trying to do; I am grateful to the University of Texas Press for permission to reproduce the passage. In the last stages Judith Waring, Peter Hatlie and (especially) Pamela Armstrong were generous with their library time, and Elizabeth Mullett and Ellen Russell held out inducements for finishing. Estelle Sheehan’s sharp eyes and cheerful professionalism rescued and reassured. Leo’s company in our study and his assumption that writing books is the most normal of activities sustained me to the end. But I owe most of all to Michael, my husband who did not compile the index, but has read and improved more of this book, more times, in more ways, than I can remember. He is my most rigorous critic and the best of my friends, and this book is for him.
CHAPTER ONE TEXT AND CONTEXT
This is a book about a text. And it is about reading that text. The text belongs to what used to be regarded as the unproblematic and privileged category of ‘literature’.! But Byzantine literature should be regarded as anything but unproblematic. It has never had a good press, least of all from its own students. The inferior nature of Byzantine literature’ was for Gibbon an essential plank of his thesis of decline and fall, which has gone unquestioned until very recently. And it has been de rigueur for professors of Byzantine language and literature to echo Gibbon’s harsh judgment. Romilly Jenkins put it best:
The Byzantine empire remains almost the unique example of a highly civilised state lasting for more than a millennium, which produced hardly any educated writing which can be read with pleasure for its literary merit alone.’
This prevailing view has had the effect of ensuring that Byzantine literature is not only marginalised,‘ and so not viewed as part of any ‘great tradition’ of European literature,° but also that it has never been regarded as a literature in its own right: it is virgin territory for the criticism of the twenty-first century. This might be thought by some to have a liberating effect, allowing the future critic to be uncluttered by Romantic views and false evaluations; that may be, but the predominant result has been rather one of invisibility. An excellent study of Byzantine scholarship can use the term ‘Greek literature’ to exclude Byzantine authors.
This position has changed recently; denigration of Byzantine literature can no longer go unquestioned, but the handful of literary studies of Byzantine literature is still pitifully tiny.’ This also means that the level of criticism of Byzantine literature has been extremely low, largely unaided as it has been, in contrast to other literatures, by advances in theory. Here also the picture has changed,* but there is a long way to go before Byzantine literary studies inhabit the same universe as contemporary literary criticism and theory.
This book will not alter that picture. It is not primarily a work of criticism or theory but of cultural history. But in that it attempts to consider how a text may or should be read, it is unusual’ in studies of Byzantine texts. An unselfconsciousness about modes of reading is another result of the invisibility of Byzantine literature: if it is not worthy of study we do not need to evolve reading strategies to cope with it. But once we decide upon reevaluation (or on no evaluation) innocent reading is no longer possible.
But precisely inasmuch as my reading of this text is not primarily literary, it becomes all the more problematic. It looks at the text and at the intertextual dimension; at other texts like this one, at other texts by the same author, at texts emulated and quoted in the text. But it also looks at the relationship of the text with what is beyond the text, with the world, with the milieu (or milieux) in which the text was generated, with the interpretative
communities” which first (and later) received the text, with the effect of the text on politics and the world. This is viewed as problematic by both the interpretative communities I have invoked so far, Byzantinists and literary critics. Byzantinists have been alerted to the dangers of using literary sources as historical evidence by the more recent of the inaugural lectures of Cyril Mango, which characterised Byzantine literature as a distorting mirror, the effect of which is to mislead the unwary reader." The timelessness and placelessness of Byzantine literature for scholars like Mango mean that we cannot ever be certain of the relationship between a text and its context.” In fact this perception had little effect on the way texts were read, because of the nature of Byzantine texts—and because they were read in isolation from literatures whose students were more alive to these issues.
However much Byzantinists accepted Mango’s view, they could not carry through its logic and eschew literary sources, because the vast majority of texts which have survived to us from the Byzantine empire appear to be privileged, ‘literary’. Legal texts,” foundation charters," inscriptions’ have an undeniable literary dimension (though it remains to be discovered what that is). Ancient historians may choose (though it is a questionable practice) between ‘literary’ sources and ‘hard’ evidence; Byzantinists do not have that luxury. Only material evidence appears to offer the illusion of evidence free from the taint of literariness.” And in the analysis of material evidence Byzantinists have clearsightedly turned away from empiricism." But as far as literary sources are concerned invisibility appears to serve as a protective device saving Byzantinists from having to glance into the abyss. If we once accept that Byzantine literature is a distorting mirror we must try to understand (even if we cannot correct) that distortion, because (apart from a handful of documentary texts) we have no alternative.
But it is not immediately apparent to those who habitually read privileged text that this is an option at all. The divorce of text from context has been an accepted principle of literary criticism from the early years of this century. Russian Formalism preceded New Criticism” by some considerable time in removing critical emphasis from the author and placing it on the text. New Criticism by identifying an intentionalist® and an affective” fallacy concentrated attention entirely on the text, a verbal icon, which was typically a short piece of verse, the very type of text which might exhibit the New Critical virtues of organicism, complexity and ambiguity” and _ its characteristic strategy of close reading. There was no room for broader sweeps of text or intertext. The eclipse of New Criticism by structuralism did nothing for literary history; Saussure’s apparent privileging of the synchronic over the diachronic saw to that.” And although poststructuralism has offered the possibility of reintegrating the diachronic, it still encompasses in the concept of indeterminacy a determination not to be trammelled by referentiality; Derrida’s much-quoted dictum, ‘il n’y a pas de hors-texte’ found its most thorough-going practice in de Man’s deconstruction, and was seen by its critics as ‘a sealed echo-chamber in which meanings are reduced to a ceaseless echolalia...bombinating in a void.” Foucault, though focusing on the surely contextual issue of power, arrived at a means of defusing historicism by denying the possibility of a generalised cultural history, through his emphasis on discontinuous fields of discourse. For these theorists, all now tarred with the same brush of formalism by New Historicists, referentiality is the fundamental vice.
But this is an extreme picture, and a place for context is often found in all but the most stringent boa-deconstructors.* New Critical reading practice assumed a canon; attacks on the affective fallacy restored to a text the context of reception.” Eco conceded that ‘no text is read independently of the reader’s experience of other texts.”* Marxists have until recently stood outside this tendency, with the originating conditions of a text’s production their major concern.” Of late there has been a discernible dissatisfaction with decontextual strategies.” As early as 1970 the foundation of the journal New Literary History signalled a sense that history needed to be restored to criticism.’ The New Historicists of renaissance English literature saw a way which allowed the marking of the intertextuality of their texts with discursive, non-literary, texts without leaving themselves open to the charge of simply returning to the world-view approach of a Tillyard.” The politically engaged American poststructuralists Lentricchia and Said insist on the importance of ‘the events and circumstances entailed by and expressed in the texts themselves’,” as against the ‘repeated and often extremely subtle denial of history by a variety of contemporary theorists.“ For them American poststructuralists have, under the influence of New Critical preconceptions, denied what is contextual in European poststructuralism. Derrida’s use of margins may be seen either to elide or to make concrete the difference between the text and the hors-texte, but not to ignore the latter;* Foucault’s ‘archaeology’ may fragment history but his system of epistemes and discourses is essentially cultural rather than textual.” Hayden White denies the reality of reality, but by textualising context welcomes it into the fold of critical discourse.” To take a remark out of context, ‘Context matters, whatever the book.’*
So when Brian Stock says that ‘there is at the present time more opportunity of a rapprochement between history and literature,’® he may well be right, and Byzantine studies must surely benefit. The applicability of techniques of literary criticism and of the concerns of literary theory to literary texts would seem self-evident, but it is not—even to Byzantinists who are otherwise open to theory.” The exploitation of literary texts by historians has hitherto looked rather more like rape. My own text is a case in point. The letters of Theophylact of Ochrid have been plundered for evidence of the use of the classics in Byzantium,” for the history of Macedonia” and Bulgaria in the Middle Ages,* for provincial economic and ecclesiastical history,” for patterns of heresy,” for Byzantine feudalism.” It has never been looked at as a text in its own right. Stock’s optimistic viewpoint is based—in a somewhat limited way—on the openness to texts of Annales-school history” with its concern for mentalities.
Here, unless the literary dimension is uppermost, there is a new danger: before, historians charged through literary texts looking for peasants; now they charge through looking for mentalities. Here Mango’s warning should be heard, and every possible weapon in the arsenal of contemporary theory be used to fend off the rapists and arrive at as sophisticated a reading of literary text as is possible. Whether texts are read as literature or as history is in a sense immaterial in the aftermath of twentiethcentury movements whose achievement is to break down the boundaries between kinds of discourse; the lesson for the Byzantinist is that there is nothing that is not text.
This said, it must also be acknowledged that my concern is ultimately with cultural history, and that no historian can be totally unconcerned with referentiality. However committed we are to the enclosed world of our text, that text reflects and affects a world outside, equally composed, from our point of view, of texts but still outside our text. Texts are of course not innocent. It was a letter of Theophylact which caused the first visible split in the family government of the Komnenoi. In delating on John Komnenos, son of the sebastokrator, to the emperor in 1093 this letter caused a major family dispute which was patched up with great difficulty by Alexios.* Historians must by the nature of their calling deal with the world as well as the text and the critic.
In what follows I maintain some distinctions between text and context. I look at Theophylact’s letter-collection (and it is a collection rather than a correspondence) as a collection of letters and as the material evidence for a nexus of relationships; I look at the collection in terms of other people’s letters and of other works of Theophylact; I also look at Theophylact as author and as man. I look at the historical conditions which created reading formations for this text and on which the text itself acted. In each case I distinguish between the referential and the non-referential by means of the structure of the book, marked by a fault-line down the middle along which text and context interact: genre and milieu, collection and network, author and man.”
The text is the letters® of Theophylact Hephaistos," fifth of the Byzantine archbishops of Ochrid® and before that maistor ton rhetoron in Constantinople.” He appears to have been born some time around the middle of the eleventh century,” brought up in Euboia® and educated in Constantinople in the 1070s.* He taught during the 1080s” and was appointed to his bishopric after 6 January 1088."
Those letters which can be dated belong to the 1090s and 1100s,” though other works may be dated to the 1110s and 1120s. His writings are numerous; commentaries on the Gospels, the Epistles, the Minor Prophets, the Psalms, the Acts of the Apostles,” saints’ lives,* speeches to the emperor, discourses on the liturgy, on the Latins, and on eunuchs, his poems* and letters.© So much for text, oeuvre and author.
Other works which are read in relation to the letter-collection both span the Byzantine centuries® and focus on the reign of Alexios I Komnenos.” The present study is a companion piece also to two other projects: my study of the processes of Byzantine letter-writing and a Belfast project on Alexios.* Full treatments of parallels and more complete bibliography will be found in those works: here I concentrate on what is essential to Theophylact.
But why should I have chosen this text? Historiography might have seemed a more obvious genre on which to begin a text-centred analysis. Yet historiography has already been worked over by generations of scholars determined to winnow rhetorical chaff from historical wheat.” Hagiography has the advantage (or disadvantage) of the Bollandist tradition, which before Mango’s warning represented the height of sophistication in the use of privileged text.” Epistolography on the other hand forms a body of material which is comparatively untouched by critics or historians,” while holding out the promise of allowing us to hear the conversation of the Byzantine elite.”
Some scholars are inclined to make the wildest of claims for the usefulness of letters;” others to despair of ever being able to use them.” This contrast cannot but be illuminating. And why Theophylact’s collection? The letters are not numerous compared with those of a Libanios or a Psellos, or as accessible as those of Basil the Great or Manuel II, but Theophylact’s collection was hailed by no less an authority than Ostrogorsky as of considerable concern to historians. If we are interested in how to read Byzantine texts as history, as literature, as text, this text looks promising.
This book is itself a text, and though I make no claims of authorial authority, I avoid other claims also. Despite the (muted) trumpet-calls earlier in this introduction, it is not a work of poststructuralist criticism, nor of historiography or metahistory. It depends heavily on the magnificent positivist tradition of the Assumptionists, the order which has done so much for Byzantine texts, and in particular the work of Paul Gautier on the letters of Theophylact. As for its theoretical debts, interactionists are foremost, both in literature and in social anthropology. In general I am more concerned with the reception than the generation of text, and with the diachronic than with the synchronic, but all these concerns are represented. It is otherwise completely eclectic, and like Tzetzes on history” I hope it will persuade.”
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