Greek Scholia and Medieval Greek

During the Middle Ages, Constantinople was the civil and religious capital of the most important power in the entire Christian world, Byzantium. It was at the heart of cultural events and business activities. In the Byzantine Empire, tribunals, record offices, and ecclesiastical institutions (such as the chancellery of the patriarchate) demanded functionaries with the highest education and managerial skills. They were required to support such an administrative apparatus, and to master the language and style of Classical Greek and Hellenistic authors, all within the framework of Imperial Roman and Christian traditions. The educational system addressed the needs of this complex society by teaching students how to write, and even speak, in the purest Greek, protected as much as possible from the influence of the spoken language, and to master the system of cultural references, to which every work of literature and every social occasion referred. The programme of studies, including the canon of books, remained constant throughout the centuries. However, after 1261 (i.e. after the Byzantine reconquest of Constantinople that had fallen into the hands of the Latins in 1204), the concepts of tradition, Atticism, and education were given an even stronger ideological meaning and considered to be identity-forming factors. More than ever before, language and style, as cornerstones of society, were at the center of Byzantine education. Overall, the Byzantine schooling system was neither sterile erudition, nor an anachronistic cult of the past. On the contrary, it was meant to give people the means with which to build their society, according to a renewed and revitalized tradition: For one reason says Christophoros Zortros in his Exhortation to his own son For one reason we study the texts of wise men of the past and do not refuse to converse with the dead. What is this reason? To have a sharp mind, apt to generate thoughts, and to have a versatile tongue, apt to express what we think . Within this framework, this project will focus on the following objectives: 1: Advancing our comprehension of how the Greek language was taught in Constantinople between the 1290s and the 1360s, on the basis of classroom texts of that time. 2: Investigating how the Byzantines described the two main varieties of Medieval Greek, namely Atticized and Koiné Greek. 3: Contributing to current debates in Byzantine and linguistic studies such as: 3a) how should medieval textbooks be edited? 3b) Can then-current descriptions of Medieval Greek, provided by medieval users, be considered important sources for historical sociolinguistics (for a discipline that seeks to explain why texts are such as they are, privileging the speech communitys perspective)?

The project explored the relevance of commentaries on the Greek classics - notably on Sophocles - for linguistic research. Three were the main objectives of the project: (1) to produce the first complete critical edition of the scholia of the Moschopoulean manuscripts of Sophocles; (2) to offer a method for studying the Moschopoulean manuscripts, so deeply characterized by stratifications of exegetical material and multiple copyists involved; (3) to open a new path in the linguistics of Medieval Greek, which privileged the self-reflections on language provided by the Byzantines and preserved in the textbooks for the teaching of Greek. The pandemic and the premature termination of the project delayed the achievement of the objectives. As of December 2022, 4 articles, 2 collected volumes, and 1 critical edition are published, in press, or submitted to peer-review. Despite the end of the project, the PI is continuing to devote itself to the major objective, the critical edition of the scholia a Sophocles preserved in the Moschopoulean Manuscripts.