Download PDF | (Routledge Research in Byzantine Studies) - The Late Byzantine Romance in Context. Narrativity and Identities in the Mediterranean (13th-16th Centuries)-Taylor & Francis (2024).
188 Pages
The Late Byzantine Romance in Context
This book investigates issues of identity and narrativity in Late Byzantine romances in a Mediterranean context, covering the chronological span from the capture of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204 to the 16th century. It includes chapters not only on romances that were written and read in the broader Byzantine world but also on literary texts from regions around the Mediterranean Sea.
The volume offers new insights and covers a variety of interrelated subjects concerning the narrative representations of self-identities, gender, and communities, the perception of political and cultural otherness, and the interaction of space and time with identity formation. The chapters focus on texts from the Byzantine, western European, and Ottoman worlds, thus promoting a cross-cultural approach that highlights the role of the Mediterranean as a shared environment that facilitated communications, cultural interaction, and the trading and reconfiguration of identities. The volume will appeal to a wide audience of researchers and students alike, specializing in or simply interested in cultural studies, Byzantine, western medieval, and Ottoman history and literature.
Yannis Smarnakis is a lecturer in the Social and Cultural History of Byzantium at the University of the Aegean, Greece. He specializes in the social and cultural history of the Late Byzantine era, focusing on issues related to the construction of identities and otherness, the history of political thought, perceptions of the past, urban revolts, and the historiography of Byzantium. His most recent monograph is Byzantine Renaissance and Utopia: Plethon and the Despotate of Morea, published in Greek in 2017.
Zissis D. Ainalis studied medieval and modern Greek philology at the University of Ioannina and holds a PhD in history from the Université Paris 1 PanthéonSorbonne. He is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Social Anthropology and History of the University of the Aegean, Greece, and is a PI of the research programme “The World of the Palaiologan Romance: Representations of Self and Society in the Greek Narrative Works of the Late Medieval Period”. His research focuses on Greek-language narrative works from late antiquity to the end of the Byzantine period.
Introduction
a) Identities and narrativity in a Mediterranean context (13th–16th centuries): a brief introduction Yannis Smarnakis
The present volume aims to investigate issues relating to identities and narrativity in the Late Byzantine romances in a Mediterranean context. Thus, it includes chapters not only on romances that circulated in the broader Byzantine world but also on literary texts from regions around the Mediterranean Sea. Most of the contributions were presented in the online workshop The Palaiologan Romance in Context: Narrativity, Identities, and Gender in the Mediterranean (12th–16th centuries) in 2021.1 We would like to thank all the participants who contributed to the stimulating discussions that took place during the workshop.
This introductory chapter provides a brief overview of the conceptual framework of “identities” and “narrativity”, the key concepts that form the volume’s theoretical background; it also explains the selection of its time limits and spatial horizons. Let us start with “identity”, a concept that has been extensively used as an analytical tool in social sciences and history since the second half of the 20th century within various and often contradicting approaches. In the broader academic field of history alone, a vast number of studies have been published in the last few decades concerning imperial, national, ethnic, class, and social identities, as well as gender, the production of “otherness”, the construction of self-identities, and the role of agency.
The multiple identities of the Byzantines and their mutations in relation to the changing political, social, and cultural contexts of the empire’s life have also been recently explored in a number of monographs and collective volumes.2 Despite many differences in their methodological background, some of these studies often treat identities as fluid constructions, always in a process of transformation through their interaction with the dominant imperial and Christian discourses, local or broader power networks, the microstructures of society, and “foreign” cultures and people. In this context, political, ethnic, and local identities and perceptions of the “Other” and gendered identities have been analysed in a variety of temporal and spatial contexts.
The widespread but also sometimes under-theorized use of “identity” as an analytical tool in the social sciences has led some scholars to be severely critical of its usefulness. According to some critics, the term “identity” encompasses too many different processes and tends to be used in relation to almost anything, thus ultimately losing its analytical value. Complex social behaviours are rather simplistically associated with group “identities” that are treated as pre-existing coherent and stable entities. Moreover, researchers often end up hypostatizing communities when studying them through the lens of “identity” by imposing on their subject of study their own ideological positions and political agendas and their relevant hermeneutical schemes. Instead of “identity”, the research should focus on analysing complex and always ongoing processes of “identifications”.3
This criticism is valid when addressed to those approaches to identities that do not treat them as cultural constructions that are fluid, dynamic, and have multiple significances. In our view, historians studying “identities” should concentrate on exploring various processes of identification of persons and collectivities and analysing them in their social and cultural contexts. These processes are associated with both social practice and social imagery,4 and they do not reflect any preexisting “natural” entity, nor do they have a strictly fixed content defined by a shared experience or background of group members. After all, as Judith Butler has noted, a person’s identity is constantly shifting and contextual in relation to the constructed relations in which it is determined.5 On a theoretical level, there is a clear distinction between those who approach identities as primarily constructed from above, by dominant discourses and practices, and those who pay special attention to the role of agency and self-determinism. The first group is mainly influenced by Michel Foucault and his writings on power and governmentality and the production of subjects by specific discourses, practices, and technologies in the modern era. Foucault’s main task was to construct a genealogy of the technologies of the self through which human beings are made subjects.6 In his view, power not only is imposed externally but also acts through the regulatory and normative frameworks by which subjects are formed. In the latter case, identity is regarded as something that is shaped mostly from within, being the product of individual and group agency and social interaction.7 The processes of identity formation are undoubtedly complex. They usually involve the interplay between an individual or a collectivity and dominant discourses, representations, and power networks. In this context, the construction of different and coexisting identity categories (national, class, gender, selfhood, etc.) is of particular importance. Individuals and groups appropriate multiple identities that overlap and interact with power relations in various ways in specific social and spatial contexts. A much-discussed subject in the social sciences is the complex relationship between “identity” and “alterity”. Exclusion is a primary function of most discourses and practices relating to identities since the definition of outsiders serves as a precondition for delineating a community. This production of an “outside” draws the symbolic limits of any collectivity and becomes a fundamental constitutive element of its identity.8 Identities can only serve as points of identification and attachment insomuch as they exclude and marginalize something that is deemed “other”.9 Edward Said’s Orientalism, where the methodical construction of an eastern, exotic, feminine, feeble, and irrational otherness after the end of the 18th century in a western context has been regarded as the reverse image of a masculine, powerful, and rational West, is probably the most well-known and widely influential relevant paradigm.10 In a similar vein, the study of mechanisms through which alterities are produced – displacements of the symbolic borders between “us” and “them” in times of crisis or expansion, state or church policies of excluding, persecuting, regulating, controlling, or even integrating foreigners, marginal or heterodox groups – can contribute to broader discussions about the construction of the “other” in regard to the “self”.11 Any identity also has a temporal aspect of primary importance. On the one hand, identities have to look continuous over time to be perceived as somewhat coherent, stable, and meaningful; on the other, they have to constantly change and be transformed in order to serve new social needs and political strategies. In this respect, they are closely linked, along with perceptions and narratives of the past, to expectations of the future, since they are matters not only of “being” but also of “becoming”.12 In other words, they guide people to locate themselves as the links between the past and the future.13 Thus, the study of identities often engages with issues relating to conceptualizations of the flow of time, individual and collective memory, history-writing, and public history; it also explores visions, expectations, desires, plans, and strategies associated with imagined possible futures. Of equal importance is the spatial dimension of identities. During the last few decades, the concept of “space” has been extensively used in the social sciences, particularly in history. In the relevant studies, space is no longer perceived as merely the product of natural procedures or human activities, a pre-established entity that simply provides the background of political, social, and economic life. It is studied as a dynamic field always in a process of transformation through complex relations, which are tightly bound up with the forces of production, the planning and channelling of social, political, and economic interactions, technology, knowledge, the state, the microstructures of society, and the agency of individuals. In this context, there is always a reciprocal relationship between the constitution of places, namely spaces endowed with particular values and socio-cultural meanings, and people.14 The production of knowledge about space, the interaction of states with the territories and the populations under their rule, specific codes of social/spatial conduct, and the experiences, thoughts, and feelings of the subjects who move in, inhabit, appropriate, or even imagine space are all interconnected with perceptions of the “self” and the “other”. Thus, spatiality is a major coconstitutive part of most discourses, practices, and representations related to the production of collective and self-identifications and the exclusion or marginalization of other social groups.15 Among the identities that are explored in the chapters of this volume, gendered ones are of particular importance. Gender constitutes a fundamental category of classification in all human societies throughout history, playing a central role in the social production of similarity and difference. It is produced as an effect of discourses about a “primary” and “stable” identity,16 which is regarded as highly visible, closely associated with the body, and fundamentally relational since gender identities are primarily defined in relation to each other. Of course, masculinities, femininities, and other gender identities are not stable over time and space but are historically variable; they are constructed, performed, understood, or inverted in different ways according to specific historical and cultural contexts.
The concept of gender has been viewed in recent scholarship as a principal factor that strongly affects the whole organization and functioning of human societies. According to Joan Scott’s highly influential perspective, “gender is a constitutive element of social relations based on perceived differences between the sexes and gender is a primary way of signifying relations of power”.17 The first part of her argument means that symbolic representations, kinship, human action in the fields of economy, education, and politics, and subjective identities are all interrelated through their association with gender.18 Her second position is that gender constitutes a clearly defined field of social norms, beliefs, systems of thought, and practices through which broader power relations are articulated. In this sense, any study of identities in relation to power should take into account the inherent gendered aspects of the latter. In the field of history, during the last few decades, narrativity has been a muchused concept, often within quite different theoretical approaches. The focus on narrativity, both in epistemological debates about history and in relation to the study of various texts used by researchers as historical sources, is undoubtedly part of a broader turn in the social sciences, where the narrative has been regarded as a fundamental way to explain the interrelation between time, space, and human existence. The term “narrative” broadly refers to a story where characters and events are arranged more or less coherently through a central plot. History itself has been regarded as primarily a narrative about the past, and Hayden White has even argued that historical works in structure and form are literary creations and should be treated as such.19 Although many contemporary historians would not agree with White’s radical position, the issue of narrativity is central to any recent epistemological discussion about history as a cognitive venture. Apart from White’s approach to narrativity, historians have also been influenced by the work of other literary critics and philosophers. Mikhail Bakhtin’s oeuvre and, among other things, his concept of “chronotope” as the framework of time and space that makes the narrative representation of experience possible, as well as Michel de Certeau’s view of history as a practice and a “heterology”, a discourse on the other, that combines a narrative and a scientific aspect, have influenced several works in the context of the “cultural turn” of history since the 1990s, where narrativity is a central issue.20 In the same vein, Paul Ricœur’s oeuvre has also been equally influential. Ricœur distinguishes history from fiction since, in his view, the historical events narrated by the historians actually happened. However, the accurate reconstruction of the past is an impossible endeavour, and history must rely upon mimesis and emplotment to represent a past that has gone forever.21 In his view, narrative is a principal way of understanding the world and also plays a fundamental role in perceiving one’s existence and identity. To assign to an individual a specific identity, you have to recourse to narration, to tell a story that “can include change, mutability, within the cohesion of a lifetime”.22 In the field of cultural history, an immense number of studies have been published in the last few decades where identities relating to gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, race, etc., have been explored through their narrative representations as well. These studies cover a wide chronological and spatial span and, in general terms, share similar views about the constitutive role of narration in the construction, expression, and diffusion of identities. A major subject where identification mechanisms have been studied in close relation to narrativity is nationalism and the building of national communities. The narration of the story of a group of people bound together by alleged common blood ties and/or cultural features has been considered of primary importance for creating national identities. National histories have been structured around such narratives, which provide a continuous storyline from the supposed origins of the nation up until its present, focusing on the deeds of national heroes and villains, major confrontations with powerful rival nations, and metaphysical ideas about the nation’s destiny in human history.23 These narratives have consolidated modern linear perceptions of time and have disseminated specific “regimes of historicity”24 to a wider national audience, namely well-defined ways of viewing and dealing with the past and, more broadly, being in time. It is worth noting that such approaches, where the narrative aspects of state identities are central issues of analysis, are not common in the field of Byzantine studies, despite the recent strong interest in the study of the identities of politically organized communities in Byzantium and its wider region. Further research on such topics, especially in the context of comparative studies, could lead to fruitful results and new insights into the case of the Byzantine world.25 The focus on narrativity offers a more elaborate approach to the complex relationship between the present and the past. The latter has gone forever and cannot be resurrected or accurately reconstructed since only its material and textual fragments remain. Most contemporary historians would agree that the emphasis on empirical analysis of this scattered material is associated with older positivistic approaches to history, where the relations between the present and the past were not an issue to be considered or conceived as a problem. According to traditional positivistic history, and especially in the context of national historiographies, the present is usually viewed as mainly a linear extension of the past. In contrast to this perspective, recent historiography highlights the key role of narratives in establishing a relationship with the past. Narratives, as representations of factual and fictional events and ultimately of human existence in time and space, mediate the relationship between a bygone reality and the present, aiming to produce knowledge of the latter. They should be studied as something with their own distinctive attributes that stand for some aspects of the past and not merely as sources of information about the “real” circumstances of human life in history. The chronological boundaries of the present volume coincide in general terms with the last centuries of the Byzantine civilization and the beginnings of the socalled post-Byzantine era. We prefer to define the romances of this period written in Greek as “Late Byzantine”, thus using a chronological definition that seems more appropriate for the politically fragmented world in which they were produced and read. On the other hand, the term “Palaiologan romances”, which is often used in recent literature, implies a link with the seat and the court of the imperial family in Constantinople that cannot be taken for granted for most of the romances. In the context of the history of Byzantine literature, the term has been used to distinguish the so-called Palaiologan novels from those of the 12th century, labelled as “Comnenian”, in terms of differences in form, plot, and intended audience.26 However, in our view, this labelling is of little use when these texts are approached by historians, who seek to explore specific subjects in the broader cultural context of the late medieval Mediterranean. Of course, terms such as “late” or “post” Byzantine are also not neutral but ideologically charged. As has been recently noted, they refer to a biological and teleological model of birth, coming of age, heyday, decline, and posthumous inheritance that tends to bring back essentialist interpretations of the history of literature.27 Therefore, we use the label “Late Byzantine” for the sake of convenience as merely a chronological framework, one that is more appropriate than others for the topics dealt with in this volume. However, the authors of the chapters were free to choose their own definitions and terminology. The regions around the Mediterranean Sea form the spatial context of the volume’s chapters. The Mediterranean has long been the focus of historical investigation, at least since Fernand Braudel’s seminal work.28 Following the epistemological paradigm of the Annales of his time, Braudel conceived of a “total history”, of the 16th-century Mediterranean centred on geography and long-term, mostly economic and demographic structures. In the last two decades, the historiographical interest in this sea and its surrounding areas has seen a strong revival, mainly following the publication of Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s pathbreaking book.29 Their holistic approach and their emphasis on connectivity, networks, and entangled microecologies have deeply influenced recent historiography. Thus, in the context of Mediterranean studies, issues such as immigration, commerce, piracy, war and conquest, religious conflict, and syncretism are explored within a framework of intertwined networks of economic, political, and cultural interplay. Moreover, Mediterranean history has become a privileged field where area studies meet and interact with global history since the religious, political, ethnic, and cultural diversity of the regions around the sea have occurred within a common environment that has facilitated travel, communications, and interaction.30 In this regard, the history of the Mediterranean basin has even been studied as a sort of paradigm of the modern world, the latter being conceived as a “global” system of diverse but interconnected societies.31 In our view, the most intriguing aspect of the turn towards a Mediterranean history is the overcoming of the limitations imposed on historical research by long-established academic fields, such as Byzantine, Ottoman, and Western Medieval, studies, which focus on particular states or cultures. A Mediterranean perspective encourages comparative studies, highlights the role of connectivity and networks in human history, and sets new analytical frameworks, such as the interrelation of “localities” with a “global” world. In relation to identities, the relevant studies emphasize their plasticity, liquidity, and even hybridity, since the sea has functioned as a space where identities have been constantly traded, processed, and reconfigured.32 The eastern Mediterranean world entered a period of gradual transformation after the second half of the 11th century. The Crusades and the western expansion in the Middle East, the growth of the maritime cities of northern Italy, which steadily established their commercial networks in the eastern Mediterranean, and the migrations of people who followed the Seljuk conquest of central Asia Minor brought about major changes during the late 11th and 12th centuries. The fall of Constantinople in 1204 not only led to the political fragmentation of the former Byzantine Empire but also contributed to the creation of new Latin political, economic, and cultural networks in the broader region of the Aegean. The conquest of Acre (1291), the last Crusader stronghold in Palestine, led to significant changes in long trade routes and to the emergence of the Black Sea as an important hub in the transcontinental trade with central Asia and the Mongol Empire. During the 14th and 15th centuries, the Ottoman expansion gradually politically reunited the Balkans and Asia Minor under the rule of a new Muslim Empire. All these developments led to a great mobility of merchants, pilgrims, diplomats, officials, scholars, soldiers, colonizers, migrants, refugees, and captives, all of them coming from various ethnocultural groups, which brought with them their own cultural habits, ideas, tales, and even manuscripts. An important, though not yet systematically explored, aspect of the cultural mobility in the Mediterranean during this era is the circulation of fictional stories, both written and oral. Such stories were widespread in the broader region not only through translations or adaptations, which, as processes of transcending borders between languages and cultures, formed channels of communication, but also as entangled versions of the same basic stories.33 In this context, the traditional distinction between the original and its copies has no meaning, as researchers have to deal with a continuous interplay between several versions of the same central narrative themes.34 However, this issue, along with others relating to the historical context of the Late Byzantine romances, will be explored in the second part of this introduction. The first three chapters of the volume deal with narrative representations of identities and alterities in a variety of historical and literary contexts. Zissis D. Ainalis analyses the characters’ identities in a group of Late Byzantine romances by combining a narratological approach with a historical and anthropological perspective. He mainly focuses on issues related to class and self-consciousness, the construction of “frail” masculinities, and processes of othering through the representations of strangers and witches. He concludes by associating the emotion of most of the protagonists being strange in a familiar but dangerous and threatening narrative world with the rapidly changing historical reality of the era, where many individuals often also felt estranged from their tradition and disoriented. Nafsika Vassilopoulou compares the perception of Western cultural ways in both the Late Byzantine romances and historiography. Therefore, her study is a contribution to the relationships between identities and cultural interaction. She argues that both genres share, in general terms, a common view of a literate upper class on major features of the Late Byzantine world, such as sovereignty, political ideology, and identity. However, the author highlights several differences in the perception of Western customs, rituals, and practices in the novels of the era in comparison to historiography, which she associates with the local political and social realities of the regions where the novels were composed. Eleni Gara analyses some aspects of the early Ottoman political identity as the latter is depicted in The Forty Viziers, a framed narrative derived from the well-known similar compilation, The Book of Sindbad, a work of most probably middle Persian (Pahlavi) origin, which had seen various translations and adaptations in the medieval Islamic world. Thus, she provides a political analysis of a work that was much-read both in the Ottoman Empire and in a broader Western European milieu. The author focuses on the intersection of gender, age, office holding, and moral qualities in relation to the construction of an ideal image of the king. Furthermore, she places the work within the historical context of its production and argues that it had clear references to Ottoman palace politics in the 15th century. The next three chapters deal with the interaction between space, identities, and otherness. The narrative production of space in literature is often structured around broader cultural conceptions of the world and its parts and perceptions of the “Self” and the “Other”. Zoi Kokka investigates the images of the East and the Eastern other in the imaginary of the Late Byzantine novels. She focuses on the shift from a more realistic depiction of mostly the Near East in the 12th century to an Orientalized perception of the East in the Late Byzantine period, influenced by similar Western views. In this context, she also highlights the gendered aspects of the new image of the East through a thorough analysis of the narrative representations of the Amazons. In her view, the shift to an Orientalized East was a matter not only of cultural interaction but also of politics, as a fraction of the Byzantine elite intentionally attempted to present itself as a part of the West. Eleni Tounta’s exploration of Philippe de Mézières’ Songe du Vieux Pèlerin, a French text of imaginary and allegorical travel literature dating from the late 14th century, offers another fresh look, related to a Western cultural and political contexts, at the images of the East. The author analyses how Christian morality, soteriology, crusading politics, contemporary political relations, and ideas are interwoven to create a quest story that reorganizes space and identities. Taking cue from the privileged reader and basic hero of the Songe, the French King Charles VI (1380‒1422), Eleni Tounta interrelates the narrative representations of the East with the main attributes of the French kingship’s political identity. The next chapter, written by Yannis Smarnakis, analyses the production of space in the tale of Imperios and Margarona by mainly focusing on the conceptualization of places and landscapes and their interaction with the plot. In the author’s view, the obliteration of ethnic, religious, or, more broadly, cultural otherness is an important objective of the tale. The Mediterranean world is depicted in the narrative as a familiar “global” spatio-cultural background that facilitates mobility and interaction and where nothing is considered threatening or is explicitly defined as not conforming to some established socio-cultural norms. In this way, the novel interacted creatively with the experiences, thoughts, feelings, and imagination of its popular audience, which was spatially dispersed in several local Greek-speaking communities that were, however, organic parts of the “global” unifying networks of the early modern Mediterranean Sea. The final two chapters of the present volume explore issues of gender. Konstantinos Karatolios examines the construction of masculinities in Velthandros and Chrysantza and Kallimachos and Chrysorrhoe in the context of the succession to the throne. In dealing with his topic, the author borrows from gender studies the concept of “hegemonic masculinity”, which emphasizes the role of action and practice in the formation of gendered power relations. He concludes that both romances project an idyllic image of harmonious coexistence in a family context of strictly hierarchically arranged masculinities that is not affected by tensions and antagonisms about royal succession. This image stands in stark contrast to the political reality of the era, which was marked by fierce competition for the throne between the male members of the imperial family, and the author notes that this contrast remains an issue that should be further explored in the future. Yorgos Tzedopoulos’ study focuses on two short tales of gender transgression, resistance, and martyrdom from the time of Late Antiquity, which had been incorporated in two post-Byzantine chronicles, the so-called Chronicle of 1570 and the Chronographer (1631). The author thoroughly analyses the intertextual routes of the tales through various Byzantine and early modern texts. He argues that the two stories functioned in the historical context of the late 16th and 17th centuries as political metonymies for the state and the identity of the Orthodox Church and community under Ottoman rule. They were carefully selected to deliver their political meaning to a wider Christian audience in Europe that was interested in both the complex relationship between the Orthodox Church and the Ottoman regime and the interaction and antagonism between Orthodoxy and Catholicism.
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