The Legacy of the Psalms in Byzantine Poetry

The research project involves discovering how the Psalms were recognized as poems in Byzantine literature. The Psalms, being an important corpus of biblical poetic texts, have influenced the entire history of European literature and religious culture. Early Christian and Byzantine readers recognized their poetical features, and psalmody (i.e. the practice of singing the Psalms in divine worship) was a typical exercise of monastic life. The proposed research will analyze how the Greek Psalms, as poems, are reflected in various kinds of late antique and Byzantine poetry (up to 1453). This connection has been overlooked so far but will strongly contribute to an insight into the reception of the Bible in the Middle Ages. Although the poetic nature of the Psalms is explicitly recognized in patristic and rhetorical sources, a systematic study of their influence on later poetry is still missing. The research will consist both of a philological work and of interpretative analyses, since it will benefit from the manifold expertise of the research partners. The methodology will be shaped around the notion of paratext, defined as all the accompanying elements that make a text complete and give it additional meanings. Moreover, the study of the physical transmission of the text, as it is preserved in manuscripts, will guide the research. Different kinds of poetical texts selected from different periods will be explored, in order to ensure a variety of perspectives. The study will include book epigrams referring to the Psalms, that is: short poems that praise David (often as the new Orpheus) and his Psalms. These poems (around 100 epigrams preserved in more than 150 manuscripts) are transmitted along with the Psalms themselves and attest to the persistence of a particular poetic taste in the transmission of the biblical text. They will be the object of a monograph, including a critical edition and translation. Another field of investigation will be constituted by two paraphrases of the Psalms in verse from very different periods, which will be studied as examples of interpretation, rewriting and creative appropriation at once. In particular, the metrical paraphrase of the Psalms written in the fifth century (ps. Apollinaris of Laodicea) and the one composed by Manuel Philes in the thirteenth or fourteenth century will be compared. A parallel study (in the form of an article) of the linguistic, metrical and literary features of these two poems will show how form a diachronic point of view the Psalms were appraised by later poets. The second paraphrase, counting more than 3600 verses, is still to a large extent unedited and will be the object of a critical edition.

The project "The Legacy of the Psalms in Byzantine Poetry" investigates the meaning and use of the biblical Psalms in Byzantine literature, primarily in texts in verse shape. The main goal of the project was to produce the first complete critical edition of the Psalms metaphrasis by Manuel Philes, a scholar who was an author on commission for the imperial court in Constantinople and the aristocracy in the early 14th century. The work, comprising almost 3600 fifteen-syllables, represents the reworking (metaphrasis) of the original biblical text in verse form, with the author attempting to retain the structure of the original text as much as possible. The fact that only 98 of the 150 biblical psalms were metaphrased indicates that this is an incomplete work. The publication (in the series Byzantinisches Archiv, De Gruyter, 2023) (edited by Anna Gioffreda, Ugo Mondini and Andreas Rhoby) will not only comprise the first complete edition of Manuel Philes' Psalm metaphrasis, but will also deal in detail with questions of the author's reworking technique (metaphrasis), which are currently the subject of intense debate in scholarly discourse.