Byzantine Commentaries on Ancient Greek Texts, 12th–15th Centuries

Baukje van den Berg, Divna Manolova, Przemysław Marciniak

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781316514658
• eBook ISBN:
  9781009092050
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

This is the first volume to explore the commentaries on ancient texts produced and circulating in Byzantium. It adopts a broad chronological perspective (from the twelfth to the fifteenth century) and examines different types of commentaries on ancient poetry and prose within the context of the study and teaching of grammar, rhetoric, philosophy and science. By discussing the exegetical literature of the Byzantines as embedded in the socio-cultural context of the Komnenian and Palaiologan periods, the book analyses the frameworks and networks of knowledge transfer, patronage and identity building that motivated the Byzantine engagement with the ancient intellectual and literary tradition.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title page
• Copyright information
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction Byzantine Commentaries on Ancient Greek Texts
• Chapter 1 The Politics and Practices of Commentary in Komnenian Byzantium
• Chapter 2 Forging Identities between Heaven and Earth: Commentaries on Aristotle and Authorial Practices in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Byzantium
• Chapter 3 Cultural Appropriation and the Performance of Exegesis in John Tzetzes' Scholia on Aristophanes
• Chapter 4 Uncovering the Literary Sources of John Tzetzes' Theogony
• Chapter 5 Odysseus the Schedographer
• Chapter 6 Eustathios of Thessalonike on Comedy and Ridicule in Homeric Poetry
• Chapter 7 Geography at School: Eustathios of Thessalonike's Parekbolai on Dionysius Periegetes
• Chapter 8 Painting and Polyphony: The Christos Paschon as Commentary
• Chapter 9 Parodying Antiquity for Pleasure and Learning: The Idyll by Maximos Planoudes
• Chapter 10 Teaching Poetry in the Early Palaiologan School: Manuel Holobolos' and John Pediasimos' Commentaries on Theocritus' Syrinx
• Chapter 11 Late Byzantine Scholia on the Greek Classics: What Did They Comment On? Manuel Moschopoulos on Sophocles' Electra
• Chapter 12 Theodora Raoulaina's Autograph Codex Vat. gr. 1899 and Aelius Aristides
• Chapter 13 The Reception of Eustathios of Thessalonike's Parekbolai in Arsenios Apostolis' and Erasmus' Paroemiographic Collections
• Index