Byzantine Poetry in the ´Long´ Twelfth Century

Poetry played a prominent role in Byzantine culture throughout its eleven centuries of existence. It was an inextricable part of the everyday life of Byzantines, as it was inscribed and performed in the various environments of Byzantine society, such as the imperial court, classroom, rhetorical saloons of the Byzantine literati and ecclesiastical milieu. However, in the twelfth-century Byzantium the production of verse within these contextual areas became even larger and more versatile than in other periods. This was result partly due to the emergence of the professional authors who wrote on commission for various imperial and aristocratic individuals. In doing so, many of these well-educated men aimed to climb up the social ladder of the Komnenian bureaucracy. Although Constantinople, the capital of the empire, was the biggest centre of production, a substantial amount of poetry was also written at the periphery of the empire (e.g. Athens and Sicily). Unlike the Byzantine poetry of earlier centuries which has been the object of detailed studies, the twelfth century poetic production has not been endowed with a similar study. Thus, the present project intends to focus on the poetic production of the twelfth-century Byzantium and examine the use of verse from different angles. The project will address various questions concerned with patronage, authorship, the circulation and mobility of texts, the education system, and performance. Moreover, it will investigate the twelfth-century poetic trends and what motivated authors to produce verse in twelfth-century Byzantium. Apart from the contextualization of twelfth-century poetry, a further goal is the preparation of critical editions of unknown or neglected poems by twelfth-century authors as illuminating examples to illustrate some particular poetic trends of the period. In summary, the main goal of the present project is the publication of four articles and a collective volume in an attempt to enhance further our understanding of the role of poetry in a pre- modern society. Both the articles and the volume will lay the groundwork for the preparation of the first monographic study fully devoted to Komnenian poetry.

"Byzantine Poetry in the 'Long' Twelfth Century: Texts and Contexts The aim of the project was the focused study of the Byzantine poetry produced in the so-called "long" 12th century. The beginning of the period under study was 1081, the year in which emperor Alexios I Komnenos ascended the Byzantine imperial throne. With him began a new era, not only politically (stability in the empire), but also with regard to art and literature. The 'long' century's end was marked by the year 1204; in this year Constantinople was conquered by the Western Crusaders. The poetry produced in exile in Nikaia, while building on 12th-century traditions, pursued different emphases. Thus, the focus was on the study of those verses composed roughly during the period of the ruling dynasties of the Komnenoi and Angeloi, with the mid-12th century as a temporal focus. The project broke new ground in that no comprehensive study had previously been devoted to 12th-century poetry, unlike the poetry that preceded it. The following points were examined: the didactic function of poetry (with specific analysis of the poems of Ioannes Tzetzes in this regard); the use of poetry in the schedographical tradition (schedography represented an important teaching method in the mid-12th century; however, it also gave rise to independent literary texts); the interaction of prose and verse in different literary genres (prosimetrum); experiments with verse (i.e. the intentional use of different verse measures in a literary piece); the importance of literary authorities for 12th-century poetry (e.g., the influence of Gregory of Nazianzus and the Anthologia Palatina); the interaction of satire and verse in different intellectual milieus; poetry on commission (this primarily concerned those official or semi-official poems that authors such as Theodoros Prodromos, "Manganeios" Prodromos, Ioannes Tzetzes, Theodoros Balsamon, and others had addressed to members of the imperial court and the aristocracy). In addition, previously unpublished poems of the 12th century were edited in the course of the project: Here, particular mention should be made of a poem of about 200 verses entitled "On Toothache," which is less a medical treatise than a description of toothache as a metaphor. The project's conference allowed Byzantine poetry to be examined from a variety of angles, discussing both authors and genres; the resulting proceedings' volume will constitute the first monograph devoted exclusively to the texts and contexts of twelfth-century Byzantine poetry. The project succeeded in clearly underlining the importance of poetry in the Komnenoi and Angeloi epochs. Verses written in the 12th century played an important social function, as it was used in the imperial and aristocratic milieu for practical concerns; the strict separation of prose and verse hardly played a role in Byzantium, unlike today.