Digenis Akritis
Digenis Akritis

Author: Elizabeth Jeffreys

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1998-05-07

Total Pages: 472

ISBN-13: 9780521394727

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Digenis Akritis is Byzantium's only epic poem, telling of the exploits of a heroic warrior of 'double descent' on the frontiers between Byzantine and Arab territory in Asia Minor in the ninth and tenth centuries. It survives in six versions, of which the two oldest, dating from the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, are presented here in an edited version. The manuscripts are preserved in the Grottaferrata monastery near Rome and the Escorial Library in Spain. Behind these two versions lies a twelfth-century poem that can now be glimpsed at but not reconstructed. This edition and translation aims at highlighting the nature of the lost poem, and at providing a guide through the maze of recent discussions about the epic and its background.

Digenis Akritas, the Two-blood Border Lord : the Grottaferrata Version
Digenis Akritas, the Two-blood Border Lord : the Grottaferrata Version

Author: Denison B. Hull

Publisher:

Published: 1985

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13:

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Among the epic romances of post-Barbarian Europe, such as Roland and El Cid, Digenis Akritas has been the least known in the West. It is the story of a half-breed prince who guarded the Roman Empire of Byzantium on the Euphrates in the tenth century. This new translation recaptures an urbane vanished civilization.

Archaeology and the Homeric Epic
Archaeology and the Homeric Epic

Author: Susan Sherratt

Publisher: Oxbow Books

Published: 2016-11-30

Total Pages: 183

ISBN-13: 178570298X

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The relationship between the Homeric epics and archaeology has long suffered mixed fortunes, swinging between 'fundamentalist' attempts to use archaeology in order to demonstrate the essential historicity of the epics and their background, and outright rejection of the idea that archaeology is capable of contributing anything at all to our understanding and appreciation of the epics. Archaeology and the Homeric Epic concentrates less on historicity in favor of exploring a variety of other, perhaps sometimes more oblique, ways in which we can use a multidisciplinary approach – archaeology, philology, anthropology and social history – to help offer insights into the epics, the contexts of their possibly prolonged creation, aspects of their 'prehistory', and what they may have stood for at various times in their long oral and written history. The effects of the Homeric epics on the history and popular reception of archaeology, especially in the particular context of modern Germany, is also a theme that is explored here. Contributors explore a variety of issues including the relationships between visual and verbal imagery, the social contexts of epic (or sub-epic) creation or re-creation, the roles of bards and their relationships to different types of patrons and audiences, the construction and uses of 'history' as traceable through both epic and archaeology and the relationship between 'prehistoric' (oral) and 'historical' (recorded in writing) periods. Throughout, the emphasis is on context and its relevance to the creation, transmission, re-creation and manipulation of epic in the present (or near-present) as well as in the ancient Greek past.

Digenes Akrites
Digenes Akrites

Author: Roderick Beaton

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-03-02

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 1351944177

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Called variously the ’Byzantine epic’, the ’epic of Modern Greece’, an ’epic-romance’ and ’romance’, the poem of Digenes Akrites has, since its rediscovery towards the end of the nineteenth century, exerted a tenacious hold on the imagination of scholars from a wide range of disciplines and from many countries of the world, as well as of writers and public figures in Greece. There are many reasons for this, not least among them the prestige accorded to ’national epics’ in the nineteenth century and for some time afterwards. Another reason must surely be the work’s uniqueness: there is nothing quite like Digenes Akrites in either Byzantine or Modern Greek literature. However, this uniqueness is not confined to its problematic place in the literary ’canon’ and literary history. As historical testimony, and in its complex relationship to later oral song and to older myth and story-telling, Digenes Akrites again has no close parallels of comparable length in Byzantine or Modern Greek culture. Whether as a literary text, a historical source, or a manifestation of an oral popular culture, Digenes Akrites remains, more than a century after its rediscovery, persistently enigmatic. This Byzantine ’epic’ or ’romance’ has now become the focus of new research across a range of disciplines since the publication in 1985 of a radically revised edition based on the Escorial text of the poem, by Stylianos Alexiou. The papers in this volume, derived from a conference held in May 1992 at King’s College London, seeks to present and discuss the results of this new research. Digenes Akrites: New Approaches to Byzantine Heroic Poetry is the second in the series published by Variorum for the Centre for Hellenic Studies, King’s College London.

The Armenians in the Medieval Islamic World
The Armenians in the Medieval Islamic World

Author: Seta B. Dadoyan

Publisher: Transaction Publishers

Published: 2011-11-30

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 1412846528

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In this first of a massive three-volume work, Seta B. Dadoyan studies the Armenian experience in the medieval Islamic world and takes the reader through hitherto undiscovered paradigmatic cases of interaction with other populations in the region. Being an Armenian, Dadoyan argues, means having an ethnic ancestry laden with narratives drawn from the vast historic Armenian habitat. Contradictory trends went into the making of Armenian history, yet most narratives fail to reflect this rich texture. Linking Armenian-Islamic history is one way of dealing with the problem. Dadoyan’s concern is also to outline revolutionary elements in the making of Armenian ideologies and politics. This extensive work captures the multidimensional nature of the Armenian experience in the medieval Islamic world. The author holds that every piece of literature, including historical writing, is an artifact. It is a composition of many elements arranged in certain forms: order, sequence, proportion, detail, intensity, etc. The author has composed and arranged the larger subjects and their sub-themes in such a way as to create an open, dynamic continuity to Armenian history that is intellectually intriguing, aesthetically appealing, and close to lived experiences.

Fictional Storytelling in the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean and Beyond
Fictional Storytelling in the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean and Beyond

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2016-09-27

Total Pages: 550

ISBN-13: 9004307729

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This volume offers an overview of the rich narrative material circulating in the medieval Mediterranean. As a multilingual and multicultural zone, the Eastern Mediterranean offered a broad market for tales in both oral and written form and longer works of fiction, which were translated and reworked in order to meet the tastes and cultural expectations of new audiences, thus becoming common intellectual property of all the peoples around the Mediterranean shores. Among others, the volume examines for the first time popular eastern tales, such as Kalila and Dimna, Sindbad, Barlaam and Joasaph, and Arabic epics together with their Byzantine adaptations. Original Byzantine love romances, both learned and vernacular, are discussed together with their Persian counterparts and with later adaptations of western stories. This combination of such disparate narrative material aims to highlight both the wealth of medieval storytelling and the fundamental unity of the medieval Mediterranean world. Contributors are Carolina Cupane, Faustina Doufikar-Aerts, Massimo Fusillo, Corinne Jouanno, Grammatiki A. Karla, Bettina Krönung, Renata Lavagnini, Ulrich Moennig, Ingela Nilsson, Claudia Ott, Oliver Overwien, Panagiotis Roilos, Julia Rubanovich, Ida Toth, Robert Volk and Kostas Yiavis.

Reading the Late Byzantine Romance
Reading the Late Byzantine Romance

Author: Adam J. Goldwyn

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-12-20

Total Pages: 467

ISBN-13: 1108168620

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The corpus of Palaiologan romances consists of about a dozen works of imaginative fiction from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries which narrate the trials and tribulations of aristocratic young lovers. This volume brings together leading scholars of Byzantine literature to examine the corpus afresh and aims to be the definitive work on the subject, suitable for scholars and students of all levels. It offers interdisciplinary and transnational approaches which demonstrate the aesthetic and cultural value of these works in their own right and their centrality to the medieval and early modern Greek, European and Mediterranean literary traditions. From a historical perspective, the volume also emphasizes how the romances represent a turning point in the history of Greek letters: they are a repository of both ancient and medieval oral poetic and novelistic traditions and yet are often considered the earliest works of Modern Greek literature.

Global Byzantium
Global Byzantium

Author: Leslie Brubaker

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-07-29

Total Pages: 536

ISBN-13: 100062448X

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Global Byzantium is, in part, a recasting and expansion of the old ‘Byzantium and its neighbours’ theme with, however, a methodological twist away from the resolutely political and toward the cultural and economic. A second thing that Global Byzantium – as a concept – explicitly endorses is comparative methodology. Global Byzantium needs also to address three further issues: cultural capital, the importance of the local, and the empire’s strategic geographical location. Cultural capital: in past decades it was fashionable to define Byzantium as culturally superior to western Christian Europe, and Byzantine influence was a key concept, especially in art historical circles. This concept has been increasingly criticised, and what we now see emerging is a comparative methodology that relies on the concept of ‘competitive sharing’, not blind copying but rather competitive appropriation. The importance of the local is equally critical. We need to talk more about what the Byzantines saw when they ‘looked out’, and what others saw in Byzantium when they ‘looked in’ and to think about how that impacted on our, very post-modern, concepts of globalism. Finally, we need to think about the empire’s strategic geographical position: between the fourth and the thirteenth centuries, if anyone was travelling internationally, they had to travel across (or along the coasts of) the Byzantine Empire. Byzantium was thus a crucial intermediary, for good or for ill, between Europe, Africa, and Asia – effectively, the glue that held the Christian world together, and it was also a critical transit point between the various Islamic polities and the Christian world.

Encyclopedia of Greece and the Hellenic Tradition
Encyclopedia of Greece and the Hellenic Tradition

Author: Graham Speake

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-01-31

Total Pages: 2407

ISBN-13: 1135942137

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Hellenism is the living culture of the Greek-speaking peoples and has a continuing history of more than 3,500 years. The Encyclopedia of Greece and the Hellenic Tradition contains approximately 900 entries devoted to people, places, periods, events, and themes, examining every aspect of that culture from the Bronze Age to the present day. The focus throughout is on the Greeks themselves, and the continuities within their own cultural tradition. Language and religion are perhaps the most obvious vehicles of continuity; but there have been many others--law, taxation, gardens, music, magic, education, shipping, and countless other elements have all played their part in maintaining this unique culture. Today, Greek arts have blossomed again; Greece has taken its place in the European Union; Greeks control a substantial proportion of the world's merchant marine; and Greek communities in the United States, Australia, and South Africa have carried the Hellenic tradition throughout the world. This is the first reference work to embrace all aspects of that tradition in every period of its existence.