Medievalists in the dominant western paradigm have long understood the term “medieval” as including only those features that can be applied to romano-germanic Europe.
Moreover, persistent images of Byzantium as an empire in perpetuous decline, with an ossified culture and absolutist state structure, still impede us to see it on its own terms.
Meanwhile, Byzantine texts were (and sometimes are) ed- ited and studied by philologists trained in the classical tra- dition, for whom Byzantium is only important as a passive transmitter of the ancient (non-Christian) heritage. And some recent scholars have been keen to redefine Byzanti- um as “Roman” not only in outward form, but in essence.
These approaches all emphasize Byzantium's continuity with classical antiquity, while its legacy in Southeastern Europe turns out to be very different.
Recently, some scholars, notably Evelyne Patlagean, have reclaimed the term “medieval” for Byzantium, explaining it as one of the phenotypes of broader social and cultural processes that grew out of Antiquity and resulted in Mo- dernity. This enables us to better understand the “other”
Middle Ages, freed from tyrannical concepts such as feu- dalism, caesaropapism, and dogmatism.
I suggest some ways in which Byzantine literary studies
can help us to appreciate this “other” Middle Ages. For this, we need to rethink Byzantine literature not only as a dead end in world literary history, plagued by slavish imitation of classical models, but a literary tradition with its own vitality and complexity, embedded in, and dependent on, a world that is thoroughly “medieval”.
Floris Bernard received his PhD from Ghent University in 2010. He studies and teaches Byzantine literature, with a research interest centered on the social embedment of "learned" poetry and letter-writing, especially in the eleventh century. His first book, Writing and Reading Byzantine SecularPoetry, 1025-1081, was published by Oxford University Press in 2014. Topics that feature prominently in Bernard’s work are education, competition, emotions, humor, and reading practices. He has also initiated a digital database of Byzantine poetic paratexts.
Byzantium and the “other” Middle Ages:
questions of continuity and discontinuity
5:30 pm on Nov 22, 2017 CEU—Gellner Room
Budapest, Nádor u. 9
THE DEPARTMENT OF MEDIEVAL STUDIES AT CEU CORDIALLY INVITES YOU TO A PUBLIC LECTURE SERIES
THE MIDDLE AGES: A PERIOD OR A CONCEPT? — SEPTEMBER TO DECEMBER, 2017
http://medievalstudies.ceu.edu
Floris Bernard
CEU
Evangelist Mark Seated in his Study, by an anonymus Byzantine painter.
Walters Art Museum, W.530.A
