Download PDF | Carolina Cupane, Bettina Krönung - Fictional Storytelling in the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean and Beyond-BRILL (2016).
551 Pages
Notes on Contributors
Carolina Cupane
is University Lecturer at the Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Vienna / Austria as well as Senior Research Fellow at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (Institute of Medieval Studies / Division of Byzantine Research). Since 2014 she is retired. Her research focuses on Byzantine Vernacular Literature, Byzantine Narrative, Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies, Cultural Mobility and Migration of Narrative Motifs between East and West. She is author of numerous publications on these topics and has also edited and translated a selection of late-Byzantine vernacular romances (Romanzi cavallereschi bizantini, Turin 1995) into Italian.
Faustina Doufikar-Aerts
studied Arabic, Persian and Turkish Languages and Cultures at the Universities of Leiden and Utrecht, in the Netherlands. She is Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the Centre of Islamic Theology of the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam. Her field of expertise is the transmission, acculturation and integration of literary and cultural-religious motives from antiquity into the Islamic world. She has been engaged in the study of Arabic manuscripts, and is particularly involved in the exploration of the oriental Alexander tradition. Currently she is supervising the research program Beyond the European Myth. In Search of the Afro-Asiatic Alexander Cycle and the Transnational Migration of Ideas and Concepts of Culture and Identity. She made a first edition with translation of the Arabic ‘Letter from Alexander to Aristotle’ (Epistola) and she is the author of numerous other publications among which is the standard work Alexander Magnus Arabicus. A Survey of the Alexander Tradition through Seven Centuries: from Pseudo-Callisthenes to to Suri (2010).
Massimo Fusillo is Professor of Literary Criticism and Comparative Literature at the University of LAquila, where he is Coordinator of the PhD Program on Literary and Cultural Studies. He has taught as a visiting Professor at the Northwestern University of Chicago, and has been invited Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Paris 11 Nouvelle Sorbonne. He is also member of the Executive Council of the International Association of Comparative Literature (ICLA). His major fields of research are: Theory of the Novel, Thematic Criticism, Modern Reception of ancient literature, Literature and Visual Culture, Queer Studies. Among his major publications are: I! romanzo greco: polifonia ed eros (1989; as Naissance du roman, 1991); La Grecia secondo Pasolini (2007); Laltro e lo stesso (1998); Il dio ibrido. Dioniso e le Baccanti nel Novecento (2006); Estetica della letteratura, (2009; Spanish and Turkish translations 2012); and Feticci. Letteratura cinema arti visive (2012; French transl. 2014). He edited, together with Piero Boitani, a work in 5 volumes, Letteratura europea (2014).
Corinne Jouanno is professor of Ancient Greek language and literature at the University of Caen Normandie (France). Her main field of investigation is Byzantine fiction (novels, epics, and fictional biographies such as the Life of Aesop or the Alexander Romance). She has investigated and translated into French the Byzantine epics of Digenis (Digénis Akritas, le héros des frontiéres. Une épopée byzantine, Brepols, 1998).
Grammatiki A. Karla
(PhD Freie Universitat Berlin) is Assistant Professor of Classical Studies at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She is the author of Uberlieferung, Sprache und Edition einer friihbyzantinischen Fassung des Asopromans (Wiesbaden 2001), and editor of Fiction on the Fringe. Novelistic Writing in the Post-Classical Age (Leiden/Boston 2009). Her research interests include ancient Greek popular literature, specifically the Life of Aesop and the Alexander Romance, and the rhetorical texts of the Late Antique orators such as Julian, Themistios, and Libanios. She is currently working on the edition of the MORNrecension of the Life of Aesop and on rhetoric in the imperial speeches of Late Antiquity.
Bettina Krénung
studied Byzantine and Oriental Studies in Vienna and received her Ph.D. in Byzantine Literature from Friedrich-Schiller University Jena in 2006. From 2006 to 2010 she worked on the prosopographical project “Prosopographie der mittelbyzantinischen Zeit” at the Berlin Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Since 2010 she is a Research staff member at the department of Byzantine Studies at University of Mainz. Her research interests include monastic literature and Christian-Muslim relations, especially concerning literary, cultural and diplomatic exchanges between Byzantium and the Arab world. Among her publications: Gottes Werk und Teufels Wirken. Traum, Vision, Imagination in der friihbyzantinischen monastischen Literatur, Berlin-Boston 2014.
Renata Lavagnini studied Classical and Modern Greek Philology at the University of Palermo, where she graduated. She was first Assistant Professor of Modern Greek Studies and then Professor of Medieval and Modern Greek Philology till her retirement. She is member of the editorial board of the magazine “Kondyloforos” (Thessaloniki) and is also general secretary of the Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies (Palermo). She has written a monograph on 18th-century travelers to Greece (1974), as well as several articles on the History of vernacular and Modern Greek Language, and on the reception of the Homeric poems in Byzantine and Medieval Greek literature. Her other research interests focus on the famous Modern Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, whose unpublished and unfinished poems she edited and reconstructed from the sketches extant in the poet's surviving private papers (1994; new edition with Italian transl. 2016). She currently works on the genetic edition of Cavafy’s work and on the role the idea of Byzantium played on the development of Modern Greek literature.
Ulrich Moennig
is a Professor for Byzantine Studies and Modern Greek Philology at the University of Hamburg (since 2004). He wrote a monograph on a late-Byzantine version of the Alexander romance (1992) and is the editor of two latebyzantine fictional texts, The Tale of Alexander and Semiramis (2004) and The Tale of the Hero Donkey (2009). His other research interests focus on the Greek literature in the Ottoman Empire (articles e.g. on Damaskenos Studites), early modern relationships between Greek Orthodoxy and Protestantism (a short monograph on the editions of the Typographia orientalis, 1997), and post-wwII Modern Greek fiction with a focus on the representations of the German Occupation (1941-4) and the Greek Civil War (ended 1949).
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 center of the recent monograph Raconter Byzance: la littérature au 12e siécle (2014). She is currently working on questions of narrative poetics and authorship in twelfth-century Byzantium with a special focus on Constantine Manasses.
Claudia Ott
studied Arabic, Oriental Languages and Islamic Studies at the Universities of Jerusalem, Tiibingen (Ma) and Berlin (PhD) and Arabic Music (nay) at Cairo. In her doctoral dissertation, she researched manuscripts of Arabian Epics (Metamorphosen des Epos, 2003). She is well-known as the German translator of the Arabian Nights (Tausendundeine Nacht, 2004; Das gliickliche Ende, 2016), and of Arabic love poetry (Gold auf Lapislazuli, 2008). Furthermore, she translated the medieval Aga Khan Manuscript of the Hundred and One Nights (107 Nacht, 2012). Claudia Ott is Associate Member of the Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies, University of Géttingen. <http://www.tausendundeine-nacht. com>.
Oliver Overwien
is a lecturer at the Department of Classical Philology, Humboldt University, Berlin. His research mainly focuses on the transfer of scientific and philosophical literature from Greek into Syriac and Arabic. Among his major publications are Die Spriiche des Kynikers Diogenes in der griechischen und arabischen Uberlieferung (Steiner Verlag 2005) as well as an edition of the Hippocratic text De humoribus, which is based on Greek and Arabic textual witnesses (Akademie Verlag 2014). At present, he is collecting the oriental testimonies for the presocratic Anaxagoras and working on medical textbooks originating from late antique Alexandria (Tabulae Vindobonenses and Summaria Alexandrinorum).
Panagiotis Roilos
is George Seferis Professor of Modern Greek Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, where he is also a member of the Standing Committee on Medieval Studies. His books include Towards a Ritual Poetics (co-author), Amphoteroglossia: A Poetics of the Twelfth-Century Medieval Greek Novel (2005); C.P. Cavafy: The Economics of Metonymy (2009); Medieval Greek Storytelling: Fictionality and Narrative in Byzantium (editor)(2014). His current projects on medieval culture include the monograph Byzantine Imaginaries: A Cognitive Anthropology of Medieval Greek Phantasia.
Julia Rubanovich is Senior Lecturer in Persian Language and Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She specializes in medieval Persian literature, with an emphasis on epic poetry, including Judeo-Persian, and on folk literature, notably prose dastans; on the Alexander-Romance in the Islamic domain, and more recently on the concepts of authorship in connection with the notion of literary canon. Her recent publications include “Tracking the Shahnama Tradition in Medieval Persian Folk Prose”, in Ch. Melville and G.R. van den Berg (eds.), Shahnama Studies 11 (Brill 2012); “Orality in Medieval Persian Literature’, in K. Reichl (ed.), Medieval Oral Literature (De Gruyter 2012); “Re-Writing the Episode of Alexander and Candace in Medieval Persian Literature”, in M. Stock (ed.), Alexander the Great in the Middle Ages: Transnational Perspectives (Toronto UP 2015) and an edited volume Orality and Textuality in the Iranian World: Patterns of interaction across the centuries (Brill 2015).
Ida Toth teaches graduate courses in Byzantine Greek Language and Literature, at Oxford University. Her research interest fall into three distinct fields of Byzantine Studies: fictional literature, rhetoric, and epigraphy. She currently works on the Byzantine and medieval Slavonic transmission of Eastern prose fiction, on early Byzantine epigraphy and on the encomiastic oratory of late Byzantine court.
Robert Volk has studied Byzantinology, Slavic philology and History of Eastern and South Eastern Europe. From 1988 he is collaborator at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. He specializes in the the life and works of St John Damascene and has published the Romance of Barlaam and Ioasaph (De Gruyter 2006, 2009), several studies on this topic and recently St John’s commentary on the epistles of St Paul (De Gruyter 2013).
Kostas Yiavis
is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Greek in Thessaloniki. His critical edition of the rhymed romance Imperios is due from MIET later this year. He is now working on the poetics of continuity between the Middle Ages and Early Modernity. Prior to his current post he was a research fellow at the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and a DAAD professor of Greek and comparative literature at the University of Hamburg. Before that he had been a lecturer in Greek at Cornell, a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton and a fellow in Byzantine studies at Dumbarton Oaks.
INTRODUCTION
Medieval Fictional Story-Telling in the Eastern Mediterranean (8th—15th centuries AD): Historical and Cultural Context
“Madame,” he said, “I have been telling you a story. Stories have been told as speech has existed, and sans stories the human race would have perished, as it would have perished sans water”
KAREN BLIXEN, Last Tales: The Cardinal's first tale
In the Middle Ages, the Mediterranean was the natural connector between the people and cultures around its shores, a great space in which a lively multicultural interchange of goods and luxury items has always taken place. However — unlike in antiquity when political and economic unity was the rule — the medieval Mediterranean was a shared space, disputed between various Christian and Muslim powers. Byzantium and the different Islamic potentates alternately seizing power over time were the main players in the struggle for maritime hegemony in the eastern Mediterranean, whereas the naval dominance of the Muslims in the western part was almost unquestioned.! From the uth century onwards, however, Latin naval powers, Italian and Catalan, gradually prevailed, first in the western Mediterranean, but later also in the eastern, thus reducing Byzantine and Muslim presence there. The shifting balance of power, alongside the resulting conflicts, doubtless caused a slowdown of trade in the Mediterranean area, but never disrupted the existing networks.? Of course, due to historical contingencies, the contacts, which followed the same maritime routes already established in Antiquity, developed with variable intensity. The frequency seems to have reached a peak from the 1oth century onwards, when a lively diplomatic and commercial exchange between the Abbasid Caliphate and the Byzantine Empire flourished,° after the latter had succeeded in regaining some of the territories (Crete, large parts of Syria) previously conquered by the Muslims.*
The exchanged goods which, for the most part, belonged to the realm of court culture, played an essential role in shaping the relationships between the Christian-Byzantine and Islamic worlds. Whether they were meant to formulate feelings of superiority over the respective rival or of admiration toward a superior culture,° luxury objects, usually traveling in the baggage of diplomatic envoys,® served not only as political communication. By transferring iconographic motifs and stylistic features, as well as technical achievements back and forth across the shared sea, they also broadened the knowledge horizon of both sender and receiver, thus making possible cross-cultural exchange, beyond the political and confessional divides.
Sure enough, the movement of luxury items, whether offered as gifts, capturedas spoils or sold as trade goods, was not confined within the Mediterranean space, rather they traveled along pathways that extended far beyond it, spanning Central and Northern Europe as well as Baghdad, and even further into Central Asia and China, including the well documented maritime route to the Indian ocean.’ This never-ending movement allowed a common visual language to arise, which explains the similarities such luxury objects share, most notably regarding ornamental and iconographic features.®
Far beyond its direct involvement as a partner in political and diplomatic dialogue, Byzantium always held a very special position within the connected Mediterranean space, first and foremost because of its geographical position which let it function as a contact point and a hub for every kind of fine artifact (many of which were produced by the Byzantines themselves), being itself at the same time the longed for destination of countless travelers, merchants, and adventurers.?
The Mediterranean, however, was not only a space of conflict and merchandise: artifacts and technology were not the only goods that circulated across the Mediterranean. In this multilingual and multi-cultural zone, characterized by the coexistence of a wide array of literary languages, a broad market for ideas, narrative subjects, motifs and, more generally, knowledge, was also available. Admittedly, this kind of cultural mobility is far more difficult to identify, which partly explains the lack of scientific attention it has experienced for a long time.!° Only in the last decade, an increasing popularity of transcultural studies provided a variety of new, both theoretical and paradigmatic approaches in this regard." To be sure, objects are concrete, they continue to exist and therefore can be physically touched; the evidence they offer is both visible and tangible, whereas literary motifs are immaterial, unsteady entities, free floating across space and time, and thus difficult to grasp.!? And yet, artifacts and narrative motifs, be they transmitted in written or oral form, sometimes speak a similar language. What is more, visual culture very often parallels the literary one, whose reverse image it is, insofar as the literature often stays behind the picture as its actual source of inspiration. A most impressive example of this kind of interaction is the tale of Alexander’s marvelous flight as told in version beta of the Life of Alexander, which was to become a favorite subject in monumental art, as well as in luxury objects.'8 In this respect, too, Byzantium functioned as a distributor and recycler, in a way, of exotic eastern narrative material, which it forwarded to Western Europe.*
Still, scattered, mostly oral, narrative motifs were not the only immaterial goods which traveled westwards and eastwards across the Mediterranean: whole stories, even books made the journey too. They all belong to what the Iranologist Angelo Piemontese has aptly called “the shared library of the Middle Ages”, and which can be understood as a literary counterpart to the space labeled as the oikoumene in Cosmas Indicopleustes’ world map (see the front cover of this volume). This library included, along with narrative literature of eastern (mostly India or Persia) and Greek origin, also philosophical and scientific texts. They were translated from Greek to Middle Persian or Syriac, then to Arabic between the 6th and 10th centuries AD, and later (10th— 13th centuries AD) from Arabic or Hebrew back into Greek,!® but above all into Latin, and successively into the different Romance, Germanic and Scandinavian vernaculars. Together, these works constitute the body of a Mediterranean literature, which, due to the “tenacity in literary studies of the nation” has up to now hardly been studied or even identified as such.” Admittedly, from the field of fictional literature on which the present volume’s focus lays, just five to six items from this body of literature have been handed down to us. This paucity, however, is more than compensated for by their wide dissemination. Actually, it can safely be claimed that, during the Middle Ages, the tales included in the aforementioned library — such as the Life of Secundus, the Book of Ahiqar, the Alexander romance, the tale collections Kalila wa Dimna and Sindbad, the story of Barlaam and Ioasaph — were common intellectual property of all peoples and cultures located around the Mediterranean shores, at the crossroads of Europe, Northern Africa and Asia. As did luxury objects, they also reached far beyond it, as far as to the northern European countries, and to Central Asia, China and India. Whatever the ultimate origin of the individual tales may have been, all of them were appropriated (and sometimes even expropriated) by different user communities and became reshaped in different languages in order to match different ideologies and to meet new tastes and cultural expectations.
A distinctive feature of such ‘Mediterranean’ works is the peculiar form of transmission and dissemination, insofar as they all constitute, as it were, text ‘networks’, producing entangled versions of the same basic stories with a marked tendency to proliferation and flexibility. A dazzlingly wide spectrum of lexical variation together with a free, unbiased way of dealing with the content does not allow us to reconstruct or even to assume the existence of an original fixed text. It is therefore “virtually impossible” — as Daniel Selden puts it — “to chart with any certainty either their historical development or their full global diffusion” !§
All the aforementioned texts are presented and analysed in the present volume, alongside other tales, which originated in specific contact zones — such as the borderland between the Byzantine Empire and the Arab Caliphate or Frankish Greece!® — and had a more limited circulation. Our primary aim is to give an overview of the relevant narrative material, in order to highlight both the rich and variegated world of medieval story-telling and the fundamental unity of the medieval Mediterranean world, despite the existing linguistic, confessional and not least cultural diversities.
In selecting the works to be included in this volume, we primarily focused on Byzantine narrative literature as a point of reference. In this field, we aimed at providing an outline of the existing literary production in as detailed a manner as possible. Of course, since narrativity is a basic feature affecting in some degree almost every kind of literary expression, here too priorities have been set, as we discuss in more detail below.
As for the eastern narrative tradition, we have chosen to restrain ourselves within the extremely rich and variegated Arabic, Syriac and Persian literatures focusing on texts which display a high degree of interconnectivity with the Byzantine ones. For this reason, only those works directly or indirectly reflecting such an intercultural network will be dealt with.
Middle Persian literature is, in a way, a special case. On the one hand, it does not belong geographically to the Mediterranean area which constitutes our frame of reference. On the other hand, Medieval Persia is not only the true home of several tales which entered Byzantine literature via Arabic and Syriac translations, but also produced celebrated love romances that were influenced by the Ancient Greek novelistic tradition, and may have, in turn, influenced late Byzantine vernacular romances. They have therefore been included in this volume.
A few words should be said about the organization of the selected material. Since both a chronological division and an arrangement by literary genres proved impossible, we opted for a thematic organization. We are, of course, fully aware that other arrangements would also be possible. Several tales, which are dealt with in this volume under different headings, would perfectly fit the category love and adventure, for these are basic elements of storytelling. Thus, our main concern was pointing to the distinctive and peculiar features of different texts, which otherwise belong together in both topic and stylistic refinement. To give but one example, the tales of Florios and Imperios tell a story of the love, loss, searching and reunion of two youths of royal descent, as Livistros, Velthandros and Kallimachos also do. In fact, none would contest that original works and adaptations of western stories are linked and share several common elements. On the other hand, the very fact that some authors preferred to assimilate and adapt foreign stories implies that they were exposed to them - which, from the outset, seems to be more probable in Western dominated areas, where cultural transfer had greater opportunities to take place. One could also assume that at least some of the adaptations point to different communities of receivers than the works doubtless addressed to the Constantinopolitan aristocracy, as Livistros and Velthandros were. From this perspective, it makes better sense, in our opinion, to consider the War of Troy, an adaptation of the huge Roman de Troie by Benoit de St-Maure, together with other adapted texts such as Florios or the Old Knight, than with the Troy stories, which draw exclusively from ancient and Byzantine material, as for example the Byzantine Iliad. Having said this, we concede that organizational principles per se are modern constructs. Yet, they are necessary when aiming at uncovering lines of development as well as convergences and divergences in the literary process.
The subject matters of the selected tales encompass a dazzling variety of topics: love and adventures are just as common as epic-heroic themes, spiritual and edifying subject matters, mythological stories and not least animal tales. This variety in terms of content is paralleled by a similar ‘generic’ multiplicity, ranging from what we would now label as romance to heroic epic, (fictional) biography, didactic narratives through to animals fables. However, it should not be overlooked that the very concept of genre, in the Middle Ages, had an entirely different meaning then it has today, hybrid forms being the rule more than the exception.?°
Linguistic level and style also vary from work to work, not necessarily depending on the ‘generic’ category the compositions belong to. Even between different versions of the same work conspicuous differences are often apparent, since they usually originated in different places at different times.
Yet, some constant patterns can be observed. Prose writing dominates in (in its widest sense) biographical narratives, edifying tales and story collections (Secundus, Aesop, Alexander, Barlaam, Kalila wa Dimna, Syntipas), with strong variations in linguistic sophistication between all of them. Medieval love and adventure romances, but also heroic poetry, in turn are usually verse compositions (rhymed or unrhymed), although the authors of Hellenistic romances, who first introduced fictional narrative in Greek literature, and provided the model for late Byzantine romance writing, employed prose. Here again, very different levels of style and language can be found.
The texts selected in this volume are but a small sample of a virtually endless whole. Certainly, they could not claim to cover the entire spectrum of ‘Medieval storytelling in the eastern Mediterranean and beyond”. The word ‘fictional’ appearing in the title is crucial. This volume is exclusively concerned with fictional narrative, Hagiographic or historical writing would go beyond its scope and are therefore not included, although both genres certainly abound in features modern readers would call fictional.21 However, the understanding of what was or was not fictional, in the Middle Ages, is very different to our own.” This should make us cautious in labelling works as fictional or factual when referring to medieval evaluation criteria. This is not to say, of course, that people, in the Middle Ages, were not able to distinguish between fact and fiction, either in reality or in literature. It only means that the boundaries separating the two, at that time, were often blurred, and sometimes even indistinguishable. Actually, there are enough elements showing that medieval audiences took several accounts (e.g. about supernatural visions, strange, bizarre and marvelous phenomena) we would locate in the realm of fiction at face value, just as they had no doubts either about the historicity of the Trojan war (as it was told in poetry) or about the veracity of Alexander's incredible experiences at the end of the world, a place which was inscribed in geographical world maps as belonging to the ‘real world’, as the front cover of the present volume strikingly shows. Many of the heroes whose adventures have been recounted for centuries across the Mediterranean to the delight of countless readers and listeners exist in a grey area between fact and fiction. In fact, it is impossible to ascertain to which extent medieval audiences considered figures such as Aesop, Secundus, Barlaam and Joasaph to be real persons or literary figures. As for the latter, at least, opinions diverged. While Barlaam and Ioasaph were generally deemed to be real saints, and therefore worthy of being included in the Synaxarium of the Orthodox Church (a collection of short lives of saints arranged in the order of their anniversaries), to the anonym author of the lexicon falsely attributed to the historian John Zonaras, on the contrary, their edifying story was as an example par excellence of literary fiction (plasma).?8 The chronological nucleus of this volume covers the period between the uth to the 15th century. In this regard, too, our choice is based on the specific literary situation in Byzantium, where fictional writing in its proper sense is not to be found until the late uth century. This period, though, is not to be taken as a strict parameter. Indeed, jumping back to the late Hellenistic era is unavoidable when dealing with Byzantine literary texts whose strong ties with the ancient tradition first began weakening in the 14th and 15th centuries, as the empire’s territorial extent dwindled, western influence grew and new cultural goods became available. For example, it is impossible to understand the form and meaning of the Byzantine revival of love fiction in the 12th century without considering the Hellenistic romances on which the authors rely. One cannot overestimate the refined skills they display molding the motifs and episodes they took from the narrative tradition of Antiquity, so they expressed and reflected contemporary concerns, as Ingela Nilsson shows in her chapter. The classical tradition was relevant to eastern literatures (particularly Armenian, Syriac Persian and Arabic) as well, not only in the fields of natural sciences and philosophy.?* Novelistic literature also belongs to the legacy of Antiquity bequeathed to eastern cultures. The most eminent representative is certainly the fictional biography of Alexander the Great, whose variegated Byzantine and Modern Greek afterlife is traced in the chapter by Ulrich Moennig. The work very soon spread eastwards, was first translated into Armenian (supposedly as early as the 5th century) and reached the Syriac, Arabic and later Persian literary traditions from the 7th century onwards, as described in the chapters by Faustina Doufikar-Aerts and Julia Rubanovich. Alexander therefore made the ‘oriental’ journey both as a real person — as everyone knows — and as the protagonist of a celebrated book; still, he was not the only one. Secundus, the pagan philosopher who dared to oppose imperial power, never left Greece, yet the tale of his persistent silence, even on threat of death, also became popular in a Christian context. It spread widely, entering the Syriac speaking world from the 5th, and later (gth to uth centuries) into the Arabic world. Admittedly, the tale of Secundus appears to have bypassed Byzantium; at least it did not leave any direct traces. Nevertheless, its conspicuous influence on the Book of Sindbad fully justifies its inclusion in this volume. Oliver Overwien reconstructs in his chapter the stages of the ancient tale’s travel eastward.
A no less famous hero — or rather anti-hero — is represented in the Vita Aesopi, a fictional biography, whose narrative reaches back into the 2nd century AD, and which was reworked later in manifold Byzantine, and even post-Byzantine adaptations. As Grammatiki Karla shows in her chapter, the popularity of this work was ensured not only by its dual benefits of edification and entertainment, but first and foremost by its particular openness in form and content. However, unlike the Alexander Life and the Life of Secundus, the fame of Aesop was almost entirely limited to the Greek speaking world. Only a few traces can be found in Syriac and Arabic fable collections ascribed to the Koranic wise man Luqman, who was given the legendary traits of Aesop from the early Islamic period.*5
Hellenistic love romances rank among the earliest consciously fictional narratives which are not rooted in Greek mythology, as the brilliant presentation in the introductory chapter by Massimo Fusillo illustrates. Alongside their impact on Byzantine narrative literature, they also had a noteworthy afterlife in Persian literature. It has been proven beyond any doubt that the uth century fragmentary verse romance Wamigq o Adra derives from the (largely also lost) Greek novel of Metiochos and Parthenope.*® As the chapter of Julia Rubanovich shows, however, the relationship between the love narratives of the two cultures appear to have been one of mutual reciprocity and exploitation of common themes rather than a more straightforward one of direct giving-andtaking.
Intercultural dialogue, however, is bi-directional, the journey from East to West was likewise well frequented. After having appropriated the fundamental works of ancient philosophy and science, which it was to hand back to the stirring western cultures, the Islamic world, in turn, bequeathed Byzantium with two seminal books belonging to a genre hitherto unknown in Byzantine literature, the frame tale collection. Both Kalila wa Dimna and the Book of Syntipas the Philosopher fit into this genre, and feature an overall frame story, in which many others are embedded, thus displaying an extremely refined and, at the same time, complex narrative structure with several, skillfully intertwined diegetic levels. As Bettina Krénung and Ida Toth show in their contributions, these story collections originated in India (Kalila wa Dimna) and Persia (Syntipas) respectively. The latter found its way to Byzantium late in the uth century via a Syriac template circulating in the area of Melitene (today Malatya, Turkey), a city disputed for centuries between Byzantines and Arabs (and later Seljuks). Kalila wa Dimna, on the contrary, — which was produced in Abbasid Baghdad by the 8th century — is a direct Vorlage for the Byzantine Stephanites and Ichnelates, and itself goes back to a lost version of the Indian Payicatantra via a (also lost) Persian adaptation. Although a fragment of an earlier translation is extant, the text as a whole was first translated into Greek by Simeon Seth in the late uth century, at the request of the Emperor Alexios I Komnenos (1081-1118). The attraction of both tale collections among members of the Byzantine ruling class, and even the emperor himself can be easily explained by the clever mixture of didactic and delightful contents they display, as well as by the possibility for both to be read as pieces of advisory literature, (specula principis), a genre which was deeply rooted in Byzantine literary tradition.
The same holds true for the so called ‘spiritual tale’ of Barlaam and Ioasaph, a piece of world literature whose ultimate origin goes back to India, and is a Christian adaptation of the Life of Buddha. As Kalila wa Dimna and Syntipas, the tale was first translated into Middle Persian (Pahlavi), and then into Arabic. However, it entered Byzantium, as Robert Volk shows, via a Georgian translation, transposed into Greek by the Georgian monk Euthymios at the Holy Mountain of Athos, probably around the year 1000 AD. From there, through a Latin translation, the tale was to start a triumphal journey right across Europe and far beyond, from Iceland to Ethiopia and from Portugal to Russia.
In addition to the transfer of books and ideas between the Byzantine and the Islamic worlds, a vivid cultural exchange also took place in the border area of Anatolia and northern Syria. Here, the cross cultural contact appears in the form of a creative, independent exploitation of common subject matters. The poem Digenis Akritis, a hybrid text whose generic categorization is highly controversial (in fact belonging to both the epic and romance narrative world), as Corinne Jouanno shows in her chapter, is paralleled by comparable Arabic heroic tales about holy warriors fighting against the enemies of Islam, albeit in reverse. As Claudia Ott rightly suggests, the romantic and ultimately a-historic spirit of the poem may be plausibly understood as an implicit criticism of the “bloody, brutal and humorless way of life of the Islamic holy warriors”. The crucial role of orality within the transmission history of these texts becomes particularly obvious in Ott’s chapter, where recitation performances in past and present times are linked together. Of course, reading aloud and performative storytelling were the main paths of transmission of fictional literature in the whole medieval Mediterranean, as Carolina Cupane and Panagiotis Roilos demonstrate in their chapters.
From the 12th century onwards the balance of power in the Mediterranean was compromised by the increased political and economic power of western European countries, firstly by the Italian maritime republics, and finally disrupted by the Crusades. By the 14th century, it can safely be said that the Mediterranean had become a Latin trading space, with the Byzantines nothing more than junior partners, whose mere existence depended, at times, on food supply from the West. Cheaper products from western manufacturing such as pottery, textiles, and objects d’art, flooded the Byzantine market slowly supplanting local products.?’ This shift in productivity is faithfully mirrored in the vernacular literature of that time. Here, too, the literary market is dominated by a range of items of western provenance. Highly popular love and adventure tales, such as the War of Troy by Benoit of St-Maure, the romances of Floire et Blancheflor, Pierre de Provence, and Apollonios King of Tyrus were translated from French or Italian into Greek vernacular, most probably (but by no means exclusively) in peripheral zones no longer belonging to the Byzantine Empire. Kostas Yiavis analyses in his chapter the manifold ways such foreign imports were recast in order to fit the different cultural backgrounds of new audiences.
The literary scene of the Byzantine capital itself, however, did not remain unaffected by the new (enforced) openness to western literary influences. The so called ‘original romances’ (Livistros and Rodamne, Velthandros and Chrysanza, Kallimachos and Chrysorrhoe) — original insofar as the anonymous authors did not adapt foreign templates — used several motifs from medieval French love allegory, first and foremost the idea of the judgement at the court of Love. As Carolina Cupane shows in her chapter, the realm of Love the protagonists enter in a dreamlike vision functions as a peculiar space of the marvelous, a kind of secular otherworld modelled upon the Christian one as its reverse image.?®
The impact of new literary subject matter from the West in late Byzantine vernacular literature is paralleled by the innovative way time-honored mythological themes such as the Trojan war were handled. Both the Achilleid and the Byzantine Iliad drew their material not from the Homeric poems themselves, but from Middle Byzantine chronicle writing (mostly the chronicle by Constantine Manasses), and modelled it, as Renata Lavagnini points out, according to the patterns of the Palaiologan vernacular romances. Although neither seems to be indebted to the western narrative tradition, the Achilleid, at least, is certainly well acquainted with western fashion and attire, albeit displaying, at the same time, a conspicuous competence concerning Byzantine military techniques. This mixture of traditional and innovative thematic and/ or motivic elements is undeniably a typical feature of Late Byzantine vernacular writing.
A further, no less important characteristic is the overall tendency to hybridization that affects the literary production in the vernacular to a much higher degree than the learned one. This trend brought forth a creative contamination between different genres, ultimately leading to the emergence of several sui generis works.?° Narrative is always part of the mixture, but its extent varies, ranging from a high share to a superficial colouring.
The Consolatory Fable about Bad and Good Fortune and the learned poem On Chastity by Theodore Meliteniotes, for instance, draw in many ways from the pool of the romance tradition, from which they both take several motifs and features (for instance, the motif of pilgrimage and search, the description of palaces and delightful places). However, they combine it with both the discourse of French didactic and love allegory and that of apocryphal writings and hagiographic works describing katabaseis (descents) to the Underworld by focusing on the individual, dream-like experience of the narrating I, and featuring only personifications of abstract ideas as personae dramatis.°°
The Book of Birds and the Entertaining Tale of the Quadrupeds, both dialogic poems with animals as acting personae and with a pronounced satirical undertone, may be reminiscent of eastern dispute poems, but draw at the same time on the learned Byzantine tradition of progymnasmata (fore-exercises). In these works, narrative elements are almost completely withdrawn, not least due to both their dialogic structure and satirical gesture.?!
All of these works could indeed reasonably be labelled fictional narratives. Thus, one could make a claim for them to be included in this volume. On the other hand, their very hybridity, together with the mostly subordinate role of the narrative element — and not least the limited space available — were strong arguments against them. They have therefore not been taken into account.
The wide dissemination through space and time of exemplary literature, as represented by the frame tale collections, and other edifying narrations, both of Greek and Eastern origin, such as the (fictional) Lives of Aesop, Secundus, Barlaam and, first and foremost, of Alexander, stands in sharp contrast to the conspicuous isolation of vernacular Greek romances. These mostly have a flimsy manuscript tradition, and in some cases have been handed down through only one manuscript. There are exceptions, of course: Digenis Akritis, Livistros and Rodamne, for instance, do exist in many different versions. They were recast linguistically at different times — the first was even put into rhyme or prose — and in these new forms were still read well into the 17th century. Imperios and Margarona and the Tale of Apollonios are, in a way, special cases, for they are the only two vernacular romances which, in a rhymed version, made the leap from manuscript into chapbook (first printed in Venice 1553 and 1524 respectively, and reprinted until the end of the 18th century), what ensured them enduring popularity. Still, their popularity was restricted to the narrow milieu of the Greek speaking, uneducated subjects of the Ottoman Empire, and lacked any broad cultural influence. They are certainly not comparable to the rich and articulated reception of Persian love romances, which inspired original reworkings in several eastern languages, let alone with the enormously influential books mentioned above. This, alongside the vagaries of manuscript tradition, partly depends on historical contingencies, but also on the specific conditions under which the heirs of Byzantine cultural tradition were obliged to live. Not least, it also has to do with the low esteem the vernacular enjoyed, even among the Greek intellectual elite itself. This small, but high influential social class, totally identified with classicizing, learned language, and felt nothing but disdain for the Barbarograeca, as vernacular Greek was called. This may explain why, unlike Arabian Folk Epic, which is a lively, performed popular tradition in Arabic speaking countries even today, Byzantine vernacular epic and love romances have almost entirely disappeared from the collective memory of modern Greece dwindling to just the subject of academic research, and even then a neglected one.
It is the one major concern of this volume to give medieval Greek storytelling the place it deserves within the Mediterranean narrative koine, an integral part of which it doubtless is. The second, no less important goal is to uncover the thick intertextual web in which the individual texts are weaved by giving an overall view, as complete and accurate as possible, of the relevant narrative material. This is the only way to recover, at least in part, the endless whisper of the countless stories once encompassing the entire Mediterranean world.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق