Byzantine Poetry from Pisides to Geometres

This book presents a survey of Byzantine poetry, secular and religious, from the early seventh to the late tenth century. The author discusses Byzantine poetry "in the Vienna mold", namely, genre by genre; however, as genres are definitely not static, the main thrust of his scholarly research is to demonstrate the importance of historical context. The book is divided into three parts. The first part, Texts and Contexts, forms an introduction to the whole book, in which the author presents the manuscript evidence and explains the crucial concept of context. In the second and third parts, Epigrams in Context and Poems in Context, where various kinds of Byzantine poetry pass in review, he analyzes a large number of texts and attempts to situate them in their historical contexts. The third part of the book will appear in the second volume, which is due to be published in 2006. The present volume contains the first two parts. It consists of nine chapters and ten appendices. The nine chapters are the following: Byzantine Poetry in Context; Collections of Poems; Anthologies and Anthologists; A Short History of the Byzantine Epigram; Epigrams on Works of Art; Book Epigrams; Epitaphs; Gnomic Epigrams; Writing in Gold. The appendices deal with several questions related to the manuscript material and the epigraphic evidence, on which the author`s survey of Byzantine poetry is based. The book is of great interest to philologists and cultural historians.