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369 Pages
The corpus of Palaiologan romances consists of about a dozen works of imaginative fiction from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries which narrate the trials and tribulations of aristocratic young lovers. This volume brings together leading scholars of Byzantine literature to examine the corpus afresh and aims to be the definitive work on the subject, suitable for scholars and students of all levels. It offers interdisciplinary and transnational approaches which demonstrate the aesthetic and cultural value of these works in their own right and their centrality to the medieval and early modern Greek, European and Mediterranean literary traditions. From a historical perspective, the volume also emphasizes how the romances represent a turning point in the history of Greek letters: they are a repository of both ancient and medieval oral poetic and novelistic traditions and yet are often considered the earliest works of modern Greek literature.
ADAM J. GOLDWYN is an assistant professor of English at North Dakota State University, where he specializes in Byzantine literature, Mediterranean studies and classical reception. He is the author of Byzantine Ecocriticism: Women, Nature and Power in the Medieval Greek Romance (2017).
INGELA NILSSON is Professor of Greek and Byzantine Studies at Uppsala University. Her research interests concern all forms of narration and literary adaptation, and the tension that such procedures create between tradition and innovation. Such perspectives are at the centre of her recent monograph Raconter Byzance: la littérature au 12e siecle (2014).
Notes on Contributors
Panagiotis A. Agapitos is Professor of Byzantine Literature at the University of Cyprus. His research interests focus on textual and literary criticism, with an emphasis on Byzantine rhetoric and its performance, poetics, erotic fiction and the representation of death in Byzantine literature. Over the past thirty years, he has published some eighty scholarly papers, three single-authored studies, the first critical edition of the thirteenth-century verse romance Livistros and Rhodamne, and more recently the edited volume Medieval Narratives between History and Fiction: From the Centre to the Periphery of Europe, 1100-1400 (2012). He is currently preparing an English translation with introduction and notes of Livistros and Rodamne for Translated Texts for Byzantinists and is working on a history of Byzantine literature.
Stavroula Constantinou is Associate Professor in Byzantine Studies at the University of Cyprus. Her research interests include rituals, performance, gender and the body in Byzantine culture, hagiography, literary genres, poetics and literary theory. She has published many articles on these topics and a book on female holiness and the body. She has also co-edited a volume on rituals and ceremonies in the medieval Mediterranean. She is currently working on a monograph on Byzantine miracle collections and is co-editing a volume on Byzantine emotions and gender and a volume on rewriting hagiographical legends and texts in Byzantium.
Carolina Cupane was born in Palermo. She received her Ph.D. in classical and Byzantine philology from the University of Palermo. In 1994 she became University Lecturer in the Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Vienna as well as Senior Research Fellow at the Austrian Academy of Sciences Institute of Medieval Studies/Division of Byzantine Research (1999-2013). She retired in 2014. Her research focuses on Byzantine vernacular literature, Byzantine narrative, comparative literature, cultural studies, cultural mobility and migration of narrative motifs between East and West.
Adam J. Goldwyn is Assistant Professor of Medieval Literature and English at North Dakota State University. Among other publications, he is the author of Byzantine Ecocriticism: Women, Nature and Power in the Medieval Greek Romance (2017), co-translator of John Tzetzes’ Allegories of the Iliad (2015), and editor of The Trojan Wars and the Making of the Modern World (2015).
Elizabeth Jeffreys is Emeritus Bywater and Sotheby Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language and Literature at Oxford University, and Emeritus Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. She has published widely on topics connected with Byzantine literature.
Corinne Jouanno is Professor of Ancient Greek Language and Literature at the University of Caen-Normany. Her main field of investigation is Byzantine fiction (novels, epics, and fictional biographies), with special interest in the reception of antiquity in medieval Greece. She is the author of French translations of Digenis Akritas, the Life of Aesop and the Alexander Romance, and explored the various Greek versions of the Alexander Romance in Naissance et métamorphoses du roman d’Alexandre. Domaine grec (2002) and in the volume La Fascination pour Alexandre le Grand dans les littératures européennes (x1°—xv1° siécles): Réinventions d'un mythe, edited by Catherine Gaullier-Bougassas (2015).
Romina Luzi graduated from La Sapienza of Rome (Italy) in classics and is currently a Ph.D. student at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris).
Theodore Markopoulos is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Patras in Greece. Since receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge (2006), he has written extensively on a variety of issues related to the history of Greek, including language contact in medieval Greek, the morphosyntax of modern Greek dialects and contact-induced grammaticalization in older languages. His main research interests are morphosyntactic change (especially with regard to analytic constructions and their development), language contact and historical sociolinguistics.
Charis Messis holds a Ph.D. in Byzantine studies from Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and now teaches at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. His research interests concern Byzantine history and literature, the history of gender and anthropological and sociological approaches to the Byzantine world. He is the author and co-editor of several books and articles on these topics.
Megan Moore is Associate Professor of French at the University of Missouri, where her research focuses on the medieval Mediterranean. Her first monograph, Exchanges in Exoticism: Cross-Cultural Marriage and the Making of the Mediterranean in Old French Romance (2014) focuses on the representation of cross-cultural love between the Old French and medieval Greek-speaking diasporas of medieval romance. Forthcoming projects include an edited volume, Gender in the Premodern Mediterranean and a monograph exploring the erotics of death in the medieval Mediterranean.
Ingela Nilsson is Professor of Greek and Byzantine Studies at Uppsala University. Her research interests concern all forms of narration and literary adaptation, and the tension that such procedures create between tradition and innovation. Such perspectives are at the centre of the recent monograph Raconter Byzance: la littérature au 12° siecle (2014). She is currently working on questions of narrative poetics in twelfth-century Byzantium with a special focus on Constantine Manasses.
Efthymia Priki was awarded her Ph.D. in Byzantine studies from the University of Cyprus in 2016. Her thesis, which she is now in the process of turning into a book, deals with dreams of initiation, focusing on Livistros and Rhodamne, Roman de la Rose and Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. She has given talks and has published articles related to comparative literature, dream narratives and text/image studies. She has taught medieval and Byzantine literature at the University of Cyprus and the Vladimiros Kafkarides School of Drama.
Francesca Rizzo Nervo is Professor of Byzantine Civilization and Literature at Sapienza University of Rome. Her main research interests are the hagiographic production, epics and romances. In particular, she has focused on Siculo-Byzantine hagiography, the Greek medieval epic poem Digenis Akritis (critical edition and Italian translation), and the romances The Old Knight (critical edition and Italian translation) and Apollonius of Tyre. She is currently working on the Byzantine version of Kalila wa Dimna, Stephanites and Ichnelates.
Kirsty Stewart received her DPhil. in Byzantine studies from the University of Oxford in 2016. She has presented and published articles on the role of animals in Palaiologan literature and is now part of the Premodern Body Research Group at the University of Edinburgh. She is currently working on concepts of beauty and the production and trade of cosmetics in Byzantium.
Kostas Yiavis is currently an assistant professor of comparative literature at the University of Thessaloniki. He is interested in the ways in which literature both disturbs and validates seemingly more powerful discourses. His first two books are a critical edition of the sixteenthcentury romance Imperios and Margarona (2018) and a popularising version of it with an added theoretical emphasis on the phenomenology of pre-modern writing (2019). Yiavis will next publish the essays of Kostis Palamas, a major nineteenth—twentieth-century critic and poet.
Acknowledgements
The present volume goes back to a conference held at the Swedish Institute at Athens, 27-29 November 2014, entitled ‘Romance Between East and West: New Approaches to Medieval Greek Fiction’. The conference was generously financed by the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences (Riksbankens Jubileumsfond). We are very grateful to the Foundation for its financial support and to the Institute for hosting the conference. A special thanks to Eleni Androvic for helping us with all the practicalities and to the then director of the Institute Arto Pentinnen.
The aim of the conference was to open up new avenues of exploration for the so-called Palaiologan romances, to account for new scholarly developments and to encourage comparative, cross-disciplinary and theoretical approaches. Not all papers that were presented at the conference are included in the volume, and some of the contributors did not attend the conference. The call for papers and the conference remain, though, the source of inspiration for the majority of chapters, and we would therefore like to thank all those who were present in Athens and contributed to the interesting and stimulating discussions. We are grateful also to those contributors who agreed to join the volume at a later stage.
Adam Goldwyn wishes to thank Dumbarton Oaks, where much of the work was completed during a 2016/17 research fellowship, the other fellows and in particular Elena Boeck, then director of Byzantine Studies. He would also like to thank his colleagues at North Dakota State University for the collegial and supportive environment they provide.
The volume was completed within the frame of the research network “Text and Narrative in Byzantium’, funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (2015-17). Ingela Nilsson wishes to thank the Foundation, as well as the Department of Linguistics and Philology, Uppsala University, and the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas, University of Oslo, for amiable working conditions.
We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for critical and fruitful remarks, adding to the final shape of the volume. We would also like to thank Carolina Cupane, who has offered useful advice on the structure and scope of the volume, and Michael Sharp, who encouraged us to publish the volume and supported us every step of the way. Last but not least, many thanks to copy-editor Martin Barr, whose sharp eye saved us from many blunders and whose geniality encouraged us to the very end.
An Introduction to the Palaiologan Romance Narrating the Vernacular
Adam J. Goldwyn and Ingela Nilsson
How, then, shall I write from the beginning and how shall I narrate | a narrative most beautiful, amorous, magnificent, | of how from the beginning that wondrous maiden, | that most outstanding and beautiful Margarona suffered, | and how the circular motion of years turned again? | Well, let me write and tell and narrate!’
So begins the unrhymed version of Imperios and Margarona, with the narrator’s query on how to tell his story. The Greek Jmperios and Margarona, probably composed in the second half of the fifteenth century and often seen as the latest of the Byzantine romances, is an adaptation of the French prose romance Pierre de Provence et la belle Maguelonne, composed some decades earlier, but as noted by Panagiotis Agapitos in his discussion of this particular passage, the French original has no such prologue. The author of the Greek version accordingly ‘decided to include a prologue in the Byzantine tradition, just as he turned the late medieval French prose into Byzantine verse’.” In doing so, he drew on the prologues of two earlier Byzantine romances: the Tale of Achilles and Velthandros and Chrysantza.’ By contrast, the translator of another French romance, Benoit de SainteMaure’s twelfth-century Roman de Troie, which was turned into the Greek War of Troy a century later and accordingly may be seen as one of the earliest of the Byzantine romances,* included no prologue, in spite of all other translators into European languages doing so. It seems almost as if no such readers’ instructions on the work’s intentions and usefulness were needed when the Trojan story was returned to its originally Greek context — or perhaps the translator wanted the readers to determine such things for themselves. At the same time, the Greek-speaking audience of the thirteenth century was obviously far removed both linguistically and culturally from the original audience of the Homeric epics.’
This situation illustrates well the kind of issues we are facing when entering the world of the late Byzantine romance: the relation between ‘originals’ and ‘translations’ or ‘adaptations’, the relation between Byzantine and western traditions, linguistic and cultural transfer, as well as questions of narrative, rhetoric and aesthetics — how to narrate a story in a manner that pleases the audience. These latter concerns may be seen as central to any work of literature, but the particular position of the late Byzantine romance — between the learned and the ‘popular’, the East and the West — necessitated certain narratological choices that may not have been as central to earlier Byzantine storytellers. The authors of the learned novels of the twelfth century, for instance, relied much more on the ancient novelistic tradition and wrote primarily for a limited and highly educated audience in the courtly circles of Constantinople.° The authors of the later romances, by contrast, have a much less explicit debt to the classical heritage; as this volume shows, allusions, type scenes and plot motifs were drawn from the ancient sources, but the learned citations and other direct markers are not evident. The narratological choices of the authors of the later romances could include prologues of the kind cited above, preparing the audience for what kind of story to expect, but also the handling of time, the representation of a suitable storyworld and the construction of characters.” While both the so-called Komnenian novels (twelfth century) and the Palaiologan romances (thirteenth to fifteenth centuries) could be seen as part of the same Byzantine romance tradition, they differ not only as regards form and audience, but also as regards overall plot structures.* Carolina Cupane has defined this narratological difference between the novel and the romance in terms of the focus on ‘adventure’ (avanture) versus ‘love’ (amour) in the plots, arguing that the learned novels contain no quest of adventure, presenting the protagonists as passive, whereas the quest for adventure is introduced at the beginning of the vernacular romances but then dropped in favour of passivity.? The romances, however, are much more than just love stories; indeed, these texts (like the Komnenian novels) are a product of their time: a time of shifting geographic borders, changing cultural and social mores — particularly around issues of gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity — and deepening cultural and political interaction with neighbouring cultures. Thus, as much as they are stories marked by the aesthetic ‘sweetness’ and ‘charm’ that Walter Pater identifies as the primary importance of their western counterparts,'° careful readings of the texts reveals a window into the Zeitgeist of late Byzantium.
In the present volume we have chosen to focus on the Palaiologan romances, even if the relation to the Komnenian novels is seen as highly relevant for our scholarly understanding of the later romances. While the novels have been receiving an increasing interest over the past decades, partly because of their close affinity with the ancient Greek novels, the Byzantine romances have not received as much detailed treatment.'* This volume is accordingly an attempt to offer an overview not only of the texts themselves and their research history, but also to point out new directions and trends in the study of the late Byzantine romances, both in relation to the Greek tradition and in relation to the western romances. Standing at a critical juncture in the history of Greek language, literature, culture and politics, the romances demonstrate, from a historical perspective, Byzantium’s position at the crossroads between East and West; it was the centre of important intercultural exchange among European, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean peoples. From a linguistic perspective, the romances represent a turning point in the history of the Greek language: they are often considered the earliest works of the modern Greek language and a repository of both oral storytelling and the multilingual Byzantine environment. This particular position in the history of Greek literature and language has also influenced the reception of the romances: they were not included in the Renaissance editions of Greek texts and remained more or less forgotten until they were picked up by nineteenth-century philologists, whose interest in these works was less for their literary merits than their historical and linguistic ones.**
Several scholars have contributed to the rise in the study of romances over the last few decades, and the already mentioned Cupane and Agapitos should certainly be seen as leading in that development. Working on both learned and vernacular literature, as well as both western and eastern romances, Cupane and Agapitos have been able to bring out both the similarities and the differences between the various traditions, underlining the need for a wide and encompassing study of romance literature. Building on the foundational work of Cupane and other scholars, Roderick Beaton’s Medieval Greek Romance (1989, revised in 1996) proved to be a seminal work in the field, establishing a canon whose centre and periphery are still being debated. Beaton outlined the evolution of the genre from its roots in the ancient Greek novel (first centuries CE), its socalled revival in the twelfth century and, eventually, its flowering under the Palaiologan dynasty.'* Three years after Beaton’s book, Agapitos and Ole Smith published their sharply critical book-length response to Beaton, The Study of Medieval Greek Romance (1992).'* The friction between these two volumes energized a generation’s worth of scholarship, leading to insights which bore directly on the romances themselves on issues such as date and place of composition, chains of influence and formal elements of oral and literary composition as well as larger aspects of Byzantine literature and culture, such as issues of cultural contact between Byzantium and its eastern European and western Asian neighbours, gender relations, martial ideology and contributions to Byzantine editorial and manuscript practices. This decade of growth in the field culminated in an article written by Agapitos and followed by several responses under the title “Genre, structure and poetics in the Byzantine vernacular romances of love’ (2004). The so-called ‘SO debate’, named after the journal in which it appeared (Symbolae Osloensis) analysed the genre from a variety of then current theoretical and critical approaches."’
Since then, the study of the late Byzantine romance has been concerned with several major debates, and the chapters in this volume attempt to both engage with these debates and identify new avenues for future investigation. Perhaps chief among these debates is the question of cultural exchange between the Byzantines and the neighbouring countries East and West. These questions have recently been the subject of comparative study,"© and also bear upon related questions of composition and aesthetics such as tradition versus innovation and linguistic and generic debates about translation and intertextuality. Among Beaton’s principal goals for the Medieval Greek Romance was to establish the generic and compositional categories under which each individual work in the genre could be classified. Thus, though the Komnenian novels in his scheme are walled off temporally from the romances of the Palaiologan period, their inclusion in the volume emphasizes the genetic similarities between them, specifically the ways in which all the texts reinstantiate the marriage plot among young aristocrats. And yet, the Komnenian novels were written in a learned atticizing register that recalled the ancient Greek novels. The romances of the Palaiologan period, by contrast, were written in the vernacular and in different verse and metre; perhaps more importantly, the storyworlds in which they are set draw on the fictional imaginations of the neighbouring cultures of Europe and the Mediterranean, that is, not principally from the earlier Greek but from cultural contacts beyond Byzantium — Latins, Turks and Persians. Beaton then separates those works he considers ‘originals’ from those he considers ‘translations and adaptations’.'”
Beaton’s articulation of the canon thus offers a clean taxonomy for distinguishing among the various works in the corpus; indeed, he rightly argues that ‘no literary text is produced or written in a vacuum, and one of the tasks facing the historian of literature is to disentangle the networks of relationships which combined to establish a framework for the new literary text at the time when it was introduced’.'* The Medieval Greek Romance, therefore, remains indispensable in establishing a canon and in demarcating the principal means of differentiating the various species of work within the broader family. And yet no attempt at categorization, however necessary and valuable, is without problematic instances that transgress those borders. Indeed, one of the principal critiques of Beaton by Agapitos and Smith is the rigidity of the boundaries and the ways in which they oversimplify the constellation of similarities and differences — in tone, in subject matter, in poetics, in source, etc. — that define them. Suggesting a revision of what they call Beaton’s ‘tripartite division of genetic development’,’” for instance, they propose more amorphous means of intertextuality in addition to the more identifiable models of allusion and citation: ‘a common ground of training’ that gave authors a catalogue of widely shared metaphors (the example they offer is the figure of Eros). Similarly, they challenge Beaton’s assumptions that the genealogy of translated texts is easier than the so-called originals,*® since ‘the analysis of the “translated” romances has not so far conclusively proven how this translation question was handled’.*"
The questions of how to understand the enforcement and transgression of this genetic model informs the first chapters of the volume. In “The Categories of “Originals” and “Adaptations” in Late Byzantine Romance: A Reassessment’, Kostas Yiavis (Chapter 2) offers a new way of thinking about the divide between the ‘original’ romances and the so-called translations. Yiavis argues against ‘originality’ as a sufficient category for vernacular Byzantine literature, suggesting instead that medieval writers were configured to apply themselves to authorities, and writers addressing more demanding audiences ‘authorized’ and ‘re-authorized’ sources even when writing ‘original’ works. Both translations and ‘original’ romances, then, used the same narrative strategies of appropriating and exploiting type scenes, archetypical characters and narrative patterns, yet did so in a manner that called attention to translation and originality in ways contingent not upon abstract conceptions of genre (as Beaton might have it) but depending on the political and aesthetic contexts of the authors’ literary purposes. As a result, Yiavis argues, there is no vernacular Byzantine ‘translation’ which is not a free adaptation which resets its original.
The theoretical discussion outlined by Yiavis is complemented in Chapter 3, by Carolina Cupane’s ‘Intercultural Encounters in the Late Byzantine Vernacular Romance’. Cupane analyses the twelfth-century Old French romance Partonopeu de Blois, which tells the story of how the eponymous hero reached Constantinople with the aid of the magic skills of the empress Melior and won her in marriage — thus realizing the union between East and West under French domination — to demonstrate the ways in which the story spread throughout Europe and the Mediterranean. While the versions in Dutch, German, Middle English, Italian, Spanish, Catalan and Old Norse represent more modern notions of translation as adhering to word-for-word fidelity, its passage into Greek is evident in ways that, though perhaps more oblique or indirect, nevertheless suggest a certain kind of intertextuality. Cupane’s discussion of the ways in which similar story patterns and imagery can be seen in both Partonopeu de Blois and Palaiologan romances such as Kallimachos and Chrysorrhoe offers a method for suggesting cross-cultural and interlinguistic contact in the absence of philological proof. From a broader perspective, Cupane challenges the concept of generic hybridity, which assumes a priori iterations of pure exempla; rather, she suggests, stock motifs and genres show the seamless transportability of such conventions among folk tales, romances and related narrative forms.
The ensuing chapters similarly engage in comparative East-West analyses of the romances, though from perspectives yet different still. Efthymia Priki’s “Dreams and Female Initiation in Livistros and Rhodamne and Hypnerotomachia Poliphil? uses a combination of Proppian narratology and anthropological initiation theory to explore the kinds of indirect cultural transfer suggested by Cupane. The first part of Livistros and Rhodamne and Book 1 of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili both explore how the male protagonists undergo a process of initiation in the mysteries of love, preparing them for their union with the women they desire. Dreams provide the necessary ritual spaces where these initiation processes can be accomplished, but they also perform a mediating function in the relationship of the protagonist couples. Even though they belong to two different historical and sociocultural contexts, the two texts present striking similarities in the initiation processes of their male and female protagonists.
Romina Luzi’s “The Acculturation of the French Romance Pierre de Provence et la belle Maguelonne in the Byzantine Imperios and Margarona (Chapter 5) furthers the exploration of the blurry boundary between translation and adaptation. Luzi argues that the deep similarities at the level of plot evince the Greek author’s deep familiarity with the French work, and yet, he does not adhere to a fidelity model of translation. Rather, Luzi argues that the mechanics of the text’s transmission can best be understood as a form of aesthetic and ideological translation, that is, a process of domestication by which a foreign work is made familiar to its new audience at the levels of plot, characterization and theme. The Greek work, therefore, is neither an adaptation nor an original in the modern sense of those terms, and thus Luzi’s chapter exemplifies the ways in which Byzantine writers sought to make works considered too removed from the Byzantine literary canon more amenable to an audience with tastes other than those of the readership of the French romances.
Francesca Rizzo Nervo’s ‘Chronotopes between East and West in Apollonios of Tyre (Chapter 6) adds to this discussion by offering a Bakhtinian analysis of another story that moved easily across cultural, linguistic and temporal boundaries. The story of Apollonios of Tyre, though based on a now lost ancient Greek source, was translated into Latin and its vernaculars and then again back into Greek. In each of the various retellings of the same fundamental plot — perhaps even drawn from the same Latin translation of the ancient Greek novel — not only language was translated, but rhetoric, style and genre as well. Thus, Rizzo Nervo argues, the story adopts a chronotope familiar to hagiographical writing when rendered in Greek, a moralizing discourse on Fate in Italian and an epic-romance in French.
While the chapters by Cupane, Priki, Luzi and Rizzo Nervo all focus on both direct and indirect forms of literary borrowing between East and West at levels such as plot, aesthetics and theme, Theodore Markopoulos’s exploration of intercultural exchange focuses on linguistics. In “Linguistic Contacts in the Late Byzantine Romances: Where Cultural Influence Meets Language Interference’ (Chapter 7), he explores the War of Troy, a thirteenth-century translation of Benoit de Sainte-Maure’s twelfthcentury Roman de Troie to demonstrate how, under the Palaiologan dynasty, a number of works of western origin were translated into Greek. Like the Apollonios of Tyre, the War of Troy exists in complicated relation to its western source material. But where Rizzo Nervo focuses on chronotopes, Markopoulos focuses on language. The status of the vernacular works as evidence of the everyday language of their time has often been disputed, and the War of Troy contains a most particular mixture of learned and vernacular elements, a fact which has remained largely ignored by linguists working on the history of Greek. Though this chapter is concerned primarily with the details of specific morphosyntactic properties of the War of Troy (verbal periphrases, participial forms and analytic adjectival comparatives), the conclusions it draws are accessible and farreaching: it demonstrates the ways in which the source language (Old French), leaves visible traces at the linguistic level in the target language (medieval Greek). Not just the presence of French loanwords, but the frequency and variety of French grammatical and syntactical structures suggest the deep cultural and linguistic links which bound the languages and which also indicates the very different model of translation/adaptation employed in the case of the War of Troy as opposed to the other works addressed in the previous chapters.
Taken individually, the opening chapters address the multiplicity of ways in which cultural interaction manifests itself in specific iterations of East-West cultural exchange and the resulting aesthetic, ideological and generic manipulations that enable these works to be domesticated into new cultural, literary and political milieus. Taken as a whole, however, these chapters re-enforce the parameters of the debate established by Beaton — that is, they all seek, in one way or another, to answer questions about how the romances fit into or defy categories of original, adaptation and translation. Their lines of dissent follow from Agapitos and Smith’s critique, arguing that the complex mechanisms of cultural and literary transfer belie seemingly easily delineated borders, and the evidence of these chapters seems to support such a reading. This blurring of boundaries, however, also has significance for the aesthetic and political positions of these works. Since the discovery of these works at the end of the nineteenth century, the late romances have often been seen through the lens of Greek nationalism.** In fact, Roderick Beaton groups them under the chapter heading “The First “Modern Greek” Literature’,** and while
Agapitos and Smith take issue with many of the claims made in the chapter as a whole, they do not dispute the underlying assumption.
Given the importance of the romances to Greek nationalism, it follows that the distinction between original and translated romances would have important political ramifications; indeed the distinction is in large part a way of measuring which works are original and therefore hold greater political prestige, and which are translations and therefore less important to the formation of an autonomous modern Greek identity free of external influences. These distinctions, then, are as much questions of politics, nationhood and ideology as they are of aesthetic, genre or philology. The turn towards East-West literary relations, too, has its roots in a broader cultural turn away from traditional positivist philology and towards a postmodern subjectivity that prioritizes a certain kind of cosmopolitan ideal that favours an analysis of cultural difference. A studied consideration of the political and literary contexts within which the revival of these works took place in the early-twentieth-century Greek literary imagination and their reinterpretation from a transnational perspective in the last few decades is an important consideration which may be a profitable area for future study.
While the first six chapters of the present volume engage in the synchronic question of literary relations, of Byzantium’s relationship with its neighbours, a second pressing question is the romances’ status within the broader Greek tradition, both in diachronic terms — specifically the relation of the Palaiologan romances with antiquity — and as regards the relationship between the romances and related genres within the broader corpus of Byzantine literary production. In Chapter 8 ‘From Herakles to Erkoulios, or the Place of the War of Troy in the Late Byzantine Romance Movement’, Elizabeth Jeffreys shows how the War of Troy is linguistically and narratologically related to the Palaiologan romances.** This text is not just a translation of a western source — and thus subject to a synchronic East-West paradigm of cultural exchange — but also an example of the appropriation of the ancient Greek literary inheritance by Byzantine writers. Though Greek writers in the Middle Ages had access to both Homer’s /liad and Odyssey as well as to a variety of learned commentaries, summaries and other Byzantine literature about the Trojan War, the author of the Greek War of Troy opted instead to import a French source — a decision, Jeffreys argues, that reflects the work’s production in the mixed Angevin—Byzantine political environment during the Frankish occupation of the Morea. Synchronic issues of translation and adaptation are thus intertwined with diachronic concerns of the Byzantine relation to its ancient Greek past.
While Jeffreys’s analysis of the War of Troy demonstrates one way in which the classical Greek past came to be embodied in the Palaiologan romances, Adam Goldwyn and Ingela Nilsson’s “Troy in Byzantine Romances: Homeric Reception in Digenis Akritis, the Tale of Troy and the Tale of Achilles (Chapter 9) addresses two others. Like the War of Troy, the Tale of Achilles and the Tale of Troy domesticate Trojan War mythemes into the generic and aesthetic contexts of the romance. But unlike the War of Troy, they seem not to be drawing on any obvious ancient or contemporary sources, thus again challenging the notion of originality that underlies the readings of the earlier chapters of the volume. Examining the reception of Homer from another perspective, the chapter demonstrates how ancient Greek literature entered into the Byzantine romances via a variety of other methods — ranging from narratological structures and parallel rhetorical strategies to explicit comparisons of Digenis to his heroic antecedents in the T7vojan War tradition — and were domesticated from the context of ancient epic to that of the late medieval Greek romance. The chapter also makes an implicit case for the inclusion of Digenis Akritis among the Palaiologan romances, a position at odds with previous assessments of the work’s place in the history of medieval Greek literature. This chapter argues that, often dated to the earlier tradition, the earliest extant manuscript — rather firmly dated to the Palaiologan period — represents a kind of adaptation of its own: from earlier Byzantine oral folk aesthetics and genre conventions into those of the late romance.**
Corinne Jouanno’s “Herodotean Material in a Late Version of the Alexander Romance (Chapter 10) details the ways that a late Byzantine (fifteenth-century) version of the romance interpolated various ancient and medieval sources to alter both its plot and its value as an exemplum. For instance, an episode that appears in the surviving Greek version and its Slavonic source (and therefore must have been part of the lost original text) shows Alexander inspecting his troops and suddenly seized by a melancholy crisis while thinking how short-lived he and his men are fated to be. This episode is in fact a rewriting of a Herodotean anecdote which involved Xerxes, and Jouanno’s analysis, as in the previous chapter, again challenges the long-held idea of a clear separation between educated literature and literature in the vernacular. Agapitos has pointed out the problem of this separation several times,*° and these chapters show that a facility with ancient authors such as Herodotus and Homer transcends what is a distinction over-emphasized in some modern taxonomies; these analyses show how that the fixed and rigid separation between learned and vernacular literatures is much more porous than the current state of research might suggest, especially since vernacular literatures of the period are realized through an engagement with the authoritative sources of the classical past.
In the chapter “The Palaiologan Hagiographies: Saints Without Romance’ (Chapter 11), Charis Messis challenges previous ideas about the place of romance within the broader currents of Greek literature through a reconsideration of the relationship between the two genres. Messis’s analysis argues that scholars too often identify shared narratological constructions (that is, plot patterns and type scenes) as aspects of generic affiliation, suggesting, for instance, that there exists some element properly of romance that has been incorporated as a foreign body into a hagiographical text or that an element properly hagiographical has been imported into romance. What a study of these genres through a deep diachronic frame shows, however, is that a variety of narrative strategies and patterns are simply shared from antiquity and do not inherently belong to one genre or another. Rigid classifications among Byzantine genres turns out to be as misleading a way of thinking about literature as maintaining similarly artificial barriers between translations and originals or between learned or vernacular registers. While these binaries have productively shaped much of the scholarship in preceding decades, it is rapidly becoming clear that their status as entrenched truisms threatens to obscure more than it illuminates.
If the preceding chapters sought to recast long-standing debates in new ways, the final chapters of the volume can be said to reflect what is perhaps the biggest change in cultural studies and the humanities since the debate between Beaton and Agapitos and Smith in the early 1990s, that is to say, the widespread acceptance of literary theory, particularly post-structuralist theory and deconstruction. Thus, Stavroula Constantinou’s “‘Homosocial Desire in the War of Troy: Between (Wo)men’ (Chapter 12) draws from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s seminal 1985 Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire to examine the ways in which the insights of gender studies and queer theory — discourses which have already become essential tools for critical analysis elsewhere in medieval studies and the humanities more generally — can be brought to bear in Byzantine studies. Constantinou discusses the ways in which gendered power dynamics inform the construction of same and opposite-sex social bonds, particularly with regard to the ways in which they police the boundaries and expression of sexual desire. The homosocial model she adopts represents one iteration of this gender trouble, that is, how men sublimate their sexual desire for other men by trafficking in their female relatives. She argues, for instance, that the War of Troy — the masculine romance par excellence of the Palaiologan period — can be better understood only if its male worlds are taken into consideration. The kidnappings of Hesione, Helen, Briseis and Polyxena thus become the indirect manifestations of love and revenge plots among male heroes who are otherwise unable to engage with one another directly; women’s sexual autonomy is instrumental, subjugated to the social and ideological needs of men.
Kirsty Stewart’s “Literary Landscapes in the Palaiologan Romances: An Ecocritical Approach’ (Chapter 13) brings into Byzantine studies another yet more recent manifestation of the poststructuralist turn that, as part of broader movements within the environmental humanities, seeks to understand the literary construction of medieval environmental ideology and, as importantly, the way the perpetuation of such ideologies continue to manifest itself in the modern era.*” Through analyses of Velthandros and Chrysantza, Kallimachos and Chrysorrhoe, Livistros and Rhodamne and the Tale of Achilles, Stewart demonstrates the ways in which human interactions with the landscape — thus plot and character — are shaped by environmental and gendered ideologies. In doing so, she offers a theoretical approach to the literary construction of environmental ideology between the Palaiologan romances and earlier Greek imaginative fiction (e.g. the ancient and Komnenian novel) as well as some from romances from the western courtly milieu and the Perso-Arabic tradition.
The following chapter, Megan Moore’s “The Affective Community of Romance: Love, Privilege and the Erotics of Death in the Mediterranean’ (Chapter 14), uses another recent post-structuralist paradigm, that of affect theory, to explore comparative approaches to grief and death in both the Byzantine and western medieval traditions of romance. Through readings of sea travel, Moore demonstrates how the emotional community permitted by Mediterranean voyage both draws from the past and spills over into the late medieval period, echoed for example in the example of Kallimachos and Chrysorrhoe. These echoes resonate precisely because together they create an emotional community that both reinforces and explains a model of noble love steeped in death through links to Mediterranean literary motifs, inviting us to reconsider our traditional approach to reading love in medieval romance. This chapter thus not only offers a new understanding of medieval emotional communities, it also invites readers to consider the functioning of the Palaiologan romance in a larger cultural, historical and intertextual context. Furthermore, it invites scholars interested in affect studies to consider both class and cultural context as fundamental to the framing of emotion, rather than insisting that emotions be uniquely considered within either one temporal or geographic framework.
Looking back at the important studies that have been published in the last couple of decades, and not least Agapitos’s article on ‘fiction and fictionality in Byzantium and beyond’, along with Cupane’s interesting response to it,”® demonstrates aptly that Agapitos and Smith were wrong in a significant part of their critique of Beaton’s The Medieval Greek Romance. One of the main points seems to have been that Beaton’s book was somehow premature; it was written even though a number of editions and preliminary studies were still lacking. Without that necessary foundation, Agapitos and Smith argued, it was impossible to draw any conclusions of the kind that Beaton did.*? Looking at that argument in hindsight, and perhaps especially in view of Agapitos’ own comparative study of fiction in the eastern and the western, Byzantine and Persian tradition, where all pieces are certainly not yet in place (if they ever will be), it seems that we have simply moved on to a different way of approaching these texts. Indeed, in years that have passed since the debate between Beaton and Agapitos and Smith, and certainly since the SO debate, both traditional philology and contemporary literary theory have offered a variety of new and innovative ways to understand the study of literary texts; concurrent advances in Byzantine and Greek studies have similarly reoriented scholarly attitudes to the material and the culture in which it was produced.
While each chapter in this volume sheds light on some aspect of the specific text or texts under analysis, the collection as a whole seeks to reframe two debates that have remained central to the study of this corpus. First, synchronic analysis suggests that the fixed boundaries between translation/adaptation/original are not clear-cut, and that such distinctions perhaps say more about political considerations regarding the autonomy of Greek identity and language or its dependency on cross-cultural interaction than they do about the texts themselves. The influence of cultures West and East shaped the Byzantine romances at the levels of genre, narratology, even morphology. Second, diachronic studies reframe the discussion of so-called generic hybridity and the place of the romances within larger debates of learned and unlearned literary registers. Thus, the present volume demonstrates that the narratological and rhetorical strategies of the hagiographers and romance writers were not borrowings from one another, but were perhaps the result of a shared literary inheritance. Indeed, borrowings from ancient sources such as Homer and Herodotus prove that even the writers of romance were able to participate in the learned discourses of educated Byzantine culture.
Lastly, a principal goal of the volume is not simply to offer new ways of thinking about the problems of the past, but to lay out new avenues for future research. Chief among these is a repositioning of Byzantium not as the East in the conventional East-West formulation (which sees the ‘Latins’ as the West), but as the West in an East-West formulation that acknowledges East Europe and Asia (including the Middle East) as important sources for Byzantine literature and romance in general. Though Agapitos, Cupane and others have already addressed this, it remains perhaps the most promising avenue for future research on the romances, with possible implications not just for this genre or literature as a whole, but for Byzantium’s place in a multipolar rather than a binary world. A second promising avenue for future research lies in accommodating the post-structuralist theories — gender and queer theory, ecocriticism, postcolonial and affect theory — that have invigorated much of the study of the western Middle Ages in recent years within Byzantine contexts. The concluding chapters of this volume offer a sampling of the ways in which theory can be fruitfully applied to not just the romances but Byzantine literature as a whole. Such advances would have the added benefit of putting Byzantine studies in easier dialogue with other western medieval literatures — and in this regard it is promising that the recent volume edited by Cupane and Bettina Krénung includes both eastern and western perspectives.
Though we ask and answer these questions from a decidedly modern and academic position, they were also at the core of many debates in the Palaiologan period itself. In imagining a literary day in the life of Demetrios Kydones (1324-97), a prominent Byzantine politician, epistolographer and man of letters, Panagiotis Agapitos demonstrates in his fictional afterword “The Bookseller’s Parrot’ (Chapter 15) that the Byzantines themselves were variously troubled, delighted, perplexed and charmed by these new stories; Agapitos asks us to consider them from the perspective of their original readership, to consider them not just as historical documents for philological study, but to appreciate them for what they are: tales that, even five centuries later, rank among the most sophisticated and imaginative works produced during the Byzantine millennium.
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