Abstracts

The abstracts are shown in alphabetical order by author, divided over two subgroups (demo sessions and thematic sessions). 

In the overview, it is possible to directly jump to the abstract of interest by clicking the name of the author.

 

Overview

DEMO SESSIONS: growing online corpora

  • Eirini Afentoulidou – The Vienna Euchologia Project
  • Chris Blackwell – Homeric Metrical Summaries on Two Byzantine Manuscripts
  • Shari Boodts – PASSIM – A database to map the network of medieval manuscripts containing Latin patristic sermons
  • Tim Denecker – Library of Latin Texts
  • Mark De Pauw – The Trismegistos Project
  • Pieterjan De Potter – The Database of Byzantine Book Epigrams
  • Thomas Köntges – Of Macs and Men: Growing the Open Greek and Latin Corpus through Human-Computer Interaction
  • Solvejg Langer – Epigrams in and on Byzantine buildings and artworks of Constantinople: Caption and Materiality (4th to 14th centuries)
  • Gregory S. Paulson – The New Testament Virtual Manuscript Room (NT.VMR)
  • Elias Petrou – Thesaurus Linguae Graecae: Searching for “Terms of Happiness”
  • Bram Roosen – Clavis Clavium: Peer-reviewed collaboration in a digital environment
  • William Michael Short – The problem of predetermination in ancient language corpus building
  • Sophia Sklaviadis – Machine Learning Metadata

 

Thematic sessions: book epigrams

  • Julián Bértola – Book epigrams, verse scholia and some limit cases: versified paratexts on historiography and their interplay
  • Julie Boeten – The focus in and on book epigrams: A pragmatic investigation of object clitic pronouns and the topic-focus pair in Byzantine book epigrams
  • Sien De Groot – Reading and Writing the Areopagite. Book Epigrams as Witnesses to the Transmission of the Corpus Dionysiacum
  • Luise Marion Frenkel – The reputation of late-antique authors on the Byzantine folio
  • Jacopo Marcon – Παῦλος ὁ μύστης τῶν ἀπορρήτων λόγων: on the use of the book epigrams in New Testament Catenae on Paul
  • Renaat Meesters & Raf Praet – Terra Incognita? Latin Book Epigrams
  • Alessandra Palla – Manuscript Tradition and Cultural Perspectives: Investigating the Epigrams AP 2, vv. 372-376 and AP 9, 583
  • Georgi Parpulov – A Typology of Metrical Paratexts
  • Manolis Patedakis – Epigrams from a manuscript book, to a fresco “manuscript”: Tetrastichs on the Old and New Testament by Theodore Prodromos
  • Aglae Pizzone – Voices from the 12th century: the book epigrams of the Voss. Gr. Q1
  • Andreas Rhoby – Verse and Image: the Kosmos of Byzantine Metrical Paratexts
  • Lev Shadrin – “Телос вивлос”: the dissemination of the ὥσπερ ξένοι book epigram in Old Russian manuscript colophons
  • Nina Sietis – Writing Manuscripts, Adding Epigrams
  • Maria Tomadaki – Book Epigrams by Cretan Scribes and Scholars: Manuscript Production and Culture in Crete during the 14th and 15th Centuries
  • Emmanuel Van Elverdinghe – The Copyist and the Evangelist: Epigrams in Armenian Manuscripts of the Gospels
  • Simon Zuenelli – The Ancient Legacy of the Byzantine Book Epigram

 

 

DEMO SESSIONS:
growing online corpora

 

Eirini Afentoulidou

The Vienna Euchologia Project

The Euchologion, the prayer book to be used by the clergy, contains besides eucharistic and sacramental liturgies also prayers for various occasions (occasional prayers) in the daily life of women, men and children from various strata of society and every geographical region of the Byzantine world. Thus, it offers a different perspective from most Byzantine written sources, which concentrate on urban, male, often ordained elites. Yet, the Euchologia have been understudied as a source. The number of surviving Byzantine and early Post-Byzantine Euchologia is unknown. Moreover, their contents and sequence vary from manuscript to manuscript. Therefore, a systematic study of manuscripts and their contents is necessary.

Since October 2015 a new research project dedicated to the study of Greek Euchologia up to the mid-17th century is running at the Division of Byzantine Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Members of the research team, each studying a different aspect of the Euchologia, undertake visits to manuscript collections. We are currently laying the groundwork for an online database of Byzantine Euchologia and their contents. In our presentation, we will discuss some of the challenges we face:

  • The growing corpus of manuscripts within the chronological, thematic and linguistic limits we have set – including the possibility of expanding these limits in the future.
  • The growing corpus of texts, as new prayers are identified in the course of manuscript studies.
  • Issues of intertextuality which complicate the identification and categorisation of texts: often, prayers exist in various versions, mainly as a result of “recycled” formulas. One prayer may be the combination of formulas found in two or more earlier prayers, or the same text may be used for different occasions.

 

Chris Blackwell

Homeric Metrical Summaries on Two Byzantine Manuscripts

This demo session will present the work of the Homer Multitext with focus on the metrical epigrams summarizing each of the 24 poetic books of the Iliad, as they appear on two manuscripts: the 10th Century Marcianus Graecus Z.454 [=822]), the “Venetus A”, and the 11th Century Escorialensis ω.I.12.
Our corpus of epigrams consists of 48 lines of poetry, but we will focus on how this traditional material relates to the larger evolution and transmission of Greek epic poetry, and how the technologies and workflows developed for the Homer Multitext, during its 20 year history, allow us to analyze and sythesize these, and all of our other data.
Our project is interested in multiformity and scholarly identity, and the metrical booksummaries can serve as a microcosm of the scholarly challenges at the heart of our project. Specifically, how can we at once assert identity across versions while preserving their differences:
For example, Book Γ [3] is summarized on the Venetus A as:

 —     ˘       ˘   | —    ˘     ˘ | — —|—   ˘     ˘  |—  ˘    ˘ |— —
γάμμα δ’ ἄρ. ἀφ’ Ἑλένης. οἴοις μόθος ἐστὶν ἀκοίταις·
And then Gamma is from the point of view of Helen; the pitch of battle is only for husbands

Book Γ [3] is summarized on the Escorialensis ω.1.12 as:

 —     ˘       ˘    | —     ˘    ˘ | — —|—    ˘     ˘  |—  ˘    ˘  |— —
γάμμα δ’ ἄρ’ ἀμφ’ Ἑλένηι· οἴοις μόθος ἐστὶν ἀκοίταις·
And then Gamma is around Helen; the pitch of battle is only for husbands

The one-letter difference between the prepositions ἀφ’ and ἀμφ’ is intentional, because the scribes used the correct case for the object-nouns (genitive in the Venetus A and dative in ω.1.12).
We would look forward to sharing the information architecture that we find helpful in organizing this data, and especially to discuss with an expert audience these manuscripts. All Homer Multitext data is free for reuse and modification, including over 30,000 images (natural light and multispectral) of the Homeric images we are studying.

 

Shari Boodts

PASSIM – A database to map the network of medieval manuscripts containing Latin patristic sermons

The ERC-funded project Patristic Sermons in the Middle Ages. The dissemination, manipulation and interpretation of late-antique sermons in the medieval Latin West (ERC 2018-stg 802210) studies the dynamic medieval reception of the Latin sermons preached by the Early Church Fathers. To trace the presence of these sermons in thousands of medieval manuscripts, PASSIM is building a database containing descriptions of the content and composition of the manuscripts. This database tackles a number of challenges:

  •  Patristic sermons are easily manipulated, their author attribution, title, and text subject to many changes. How do we identify them in a digital context in a way that allows the database to recognize which manuscripts contain essentially the same sermons?
  • Existing manuscript descriptions vary greatly in quality, from high-resolution digital reproductions to 19th-century facsimile library catalogues. How do we efficiently integrate this heterogeneous body of data in a database?
  • A list of the manuscripts containing patristic sermons is valuable, but we want to go further. How can we develop an interface that allows for sophisticated searches and presents the results in visualizations that serve as bridges rather than endpoints in scholarly research?

In my talk, I will present the database. Due to time constraints I will probably tackle just one of these challenges. I would be happy to choose based on the organizers’ preference in relation to the topic of the conference or the other presentations in the session.

 

Tim Denecker

Library of Latin Texts

Brepolis Latin and Oriental is a platform containing multiple Latin full-text databases, chief among which is the Library of Latin Texts, offering a wide range of Latin texts from Antiquity all the way up to the twentieth century. The other full-text databases on the platform are more thematically focused and include the Archive of Celtic-Latin Literature, the Aristoteles Latinus Database, the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, the Patrologia Orientalis Database, and Sources Chrétiennes Online. Together, the databases contain more than 160 million words of Latin, which can be searched comprehensively through the Cross-Database Searchtool. Through its Thesaurus Formarum, the CDS provides simple occurrence counting, but also comprehensive charts, full concordances and several means to compare corpora or authors to each other, with specific attention to lexical variation and patterns characteristic of different authors, texts, and periods. The full-text databases are complemented by the Database of Latin Dictionaries, a lexical resource covering not only classical Latin, but also regional and technical varieties of the language. Finally a novelty introduced with Sources Chrétiennes Online is the inclusion of French translations and the possibility to perform parallel searches between the source language and the translation.

 

Mark De Pauw

The Trismegistos Project

Trismegistos has benefitted from the work of many collaborators since its creation: staff of the MaMiGre and CIGRE projects, as well as Leuven PhD students, postdocs and professors who have contributed to many of the platform’s databases in light of their own projects. For the past years, Trismegistos has mainly been managed and maintained by volunteers, since funding agencies seem to find the upkeep and further development of existing databases a waste of money.

In this presentation, I provide an overview of new developments in Trismegistos, both in functionality and in the coverage of documents. I will also address the issue of sustainability, which is a thorny issue in the digital landscape.

 

Pieterjan De Potter

The Database of Byzantine Book Epigrams

coming soon

 

Thomas Köntges

Of Macs and Men: Growing the Open Greek and Latin Corpus through Human-Computer Interaction

Open Greek and Latin (OGL) is an international collaboration between Harvard’s Library and Center for Hellenic Studies, Perseus Digital Library, the University of Virginia Library, and Mount Allison and Leipzig Universities. Over the last five years, OGL has made almost thirty million words of Ancient Greek text available under an open licence in standard formats, employing a robust citation framework. The diverse corpus ranges from Ancient commentary to medical texts and from philosophy to literature. Most researchers and students access the data via OGL’s Scaife Reader (Perseus 5.0) or the older Perseus 4.0 environment, yet beyond this well-used interface there is a lot more data spread across multiple tools, environments, and repositories, such as raw Optical Character Recognition (OCR) data, translation alignment data, morphosyntactic data, and even a workbench for text-critical research. Additionally, with the increased corpus size, finding those passages that might apply to any given research question is a challenge. That is why the author, as a member of OGL, is trialling quantitative methods like LDA topic modelling—that is, a statistical method to find recurring patterns of co-occurring words—as finding aids for qualitative research when dealing with historical languages.

This talk will reflect on the work of the last five years, highlighting pitfalls and lessons learned, and will describe from first-hand experience how an infrastructure that employs close interactions between humans and computers for the OCR workflow, the citation system, and the quantitative exploration of historical language data, helped to successfully create the largest openly available and machine actionable corpus of Latin and Greek.

 

Solvejg Langer

Epigrams in and on Byzantine buildings and artworks of Constantinople: Caption and Materiality (4th to 14th centuries)

The project Epigrams in and on Byzantine buildings and artworks of Constantinople: Caption and Materiality (4th to 14th centuries) of the SFB 933 “Material Text Cultures” at the University of Heidelberg considers the Anthologia Palatina (AP) as a case study and starting point to ask questions about the materiality of writing in the Byzantine world. The focus of the project lies on the collection of christian epigrams from the AP, which were incorporated into the manuscript in the 10th century. The original context and setting of some of these epigrams is attested through the marginalia and other references in the codex, while for the majority of inscriptions those hints are missing.
The project deals with the archaeological and art historical documentation and editing of the epigrams in the AP and moreover their embedding in the broad spectrum of the preserved inscriptions in Constantinople, which did not find their way into the AP. These other inscriptions play a very important role for the discussion about the unlocated epigrams of the AP. One of the main goals is to understand the epigrams and their material context, from their original placement on the surface of buildings up to their transcription and posterior transmission inside a miscellany codex.
To achieve our research goals, the UB Heidelberg will create a digital research environment for the project, which will include images, transcriptions, editions, translations, as well as pictures, geographical information and maps of related objects. In this environment, the poems can be considered in many different facets and as part of a complex network of objects and places. In this sense, the project does not create a corpus in the usual meaning of the term, but a network of texts and objects.

 

Gregory S. Paulson

The New Testament Virtual Manuscript Room (NT.VMR)

The New Testament Virtual Manuscript Room (NT.VMR: http://ntvmr.uni-muenster.de/) is an online platform that hosts images of Greek New Testament manuscripts and facilitates research on these manuscripts. This demonstration will show what types of research can be conducted on these manuscripts and will explain some of the projects currently underway that use the NT.VMR, such as the Editio Critica Maior (Münster), Mark16 (Lausanne), and Paratexts of the Bible (Munich).

 

Elias Petrou

Thesaurus Linguae Graecae: Searching for “Terms of Happiness”

Throughout the centuries, many were the scholarly efforts to systematically collect and preserve extant Greek literature. During the 16th century, Henri Estienne (Stephanus), a French scholar and printer, produced a sizable lexicon known as the Thesaurus Graecae Linguae. In the late 1800’s the discovery of thousands of new papyri in Egypt and the rise of modern textual criticism motivated European scholars to undertake the creation of new lexica for Greek and Latin. The sheer volume of materials, however, and the complicated methods of gathering data manually was so overwhelming that the project was abandoned for many decades. Significant efforts, such as the one in the 1950s by Bruno Snell at the University of Hamburg, were also abandoned. Marianne McDonald, a student of Snell’s, was well aware of the challenge. Having in mind the new methods of modern technology, while searching for “terms of happiness” -the title of her PhD thesis -, she came up with the idea and the means for the creation of the electronic thesaurus, namely the TLG, after its Renaissance predecessor. 

Since the birth of TLG on the 30th of October 1972, many things have changed. The digital database has expanded geometrically in size and in time. Including more than 10,718 Greek works, consisted by 112,367,548 words (October 2019), TLG covers the periods since Homer until the end of the Byzantine Empire in 1453 and it is still growing. New adding features are multiplying the digital capabilities of the user while works and texts after the Middle Ages and, even, until the 18th century are being incorporated. From the classicists to the Byzantinists and now to the Modern Greek researchers, TLG is and can be a very helpful digital tool to their research. 

Through my paper, I will present briefly the history of TLG until our days – from the huge processor “Ibicus” to the modern smart pieces of software of “Argo” and “Io” -, along with the new abilities and the future plans of the project.

 

Bram Roosen

Clavis Clavium: Peer-reviewed collaboration in a digital environment

Some publications have the potential to transform the way we do research. It is no exaggeration to count the Clavis Patrum Latinorum and Graecorum , the Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina and Graeca , and the Clavis Apocryphorum Veteris and Novi Testamenti , among these publications. With their (near-)exhaustive lists of texts with editions, authoritative studies and status quaestionis , they allow scholars to quickly access the texts they need, to get an overview of the extant texts for a certain period, by a certain author, or about a certain saint. Without these publications and the numbering they introduced progress would have been markedly slower. 

Clavis Clavium – The integrated reference database and collaborative update platform to open up Patristic, Medieval and Byzantine texts , is designed to take these publications to the next level. We introduced these six claves into a single, robust and future-proof database, integrated them as much as possible and offer them to the scholarly community in Open Access. 

However, Clavis Clavium aims to do much more than merely present the books in a digital form. The central part or the heart of Clavis Clavium is its collaborative update platform. This platform allows the Clavis Clavium to be continuously updated, corrected, expanded. by specialists in the respective fields covered by Clavis Clavium . 

In this contribution, I will present the way this collaborative update platform works, how we integrate peer review into the process, how collaborators can claim their work on the database as a scholarly publication and what the future will bring.

 

William Michael Short

The problem of predetermination in ancient language corpus building

Classicists have pioneered the creation of electronic resources for research and pedagogy. Efforts over more than 25 years have generated numerous annotated corpora of Greek and Latin, which overlay several sorts of linguistic (especially syntactic), codicological, or critical editorial metadata on the raw text in the form of ‘treebanks’ or so-called ‘multitexts’. Recent efforts have introduced semantic annotation, as well, whether indicating words’ simple semantic roles or rich meanings drawn from lexical-semantic databases like the Latin WordNet (https://latinwordnet.exeter.ac.uk).

However, corpus builders have so far neglected to confront the problematics of predetermination: namely, that in codifying certain properties of texts, annotators appear to be determining (in the sense of ‘limiting’) their possible readings. In other words, annotation always involves selection, and thus constitutes interpretation. Therefore, standard methodologies of textual mark-up, where the aim typically is to supply one and only one tag per token, run the risk of seeming to try to fix the ‘correct’ or ‘intended’ meaning of texts, whereas classical scholarship’s hermeneutic-philological tradition recognizes that texts can normally be understood in many different ways – whether as a result of divergent transmission histories, genuine interpretive differences, intentional ambiguities, and so on.

In this demo session I propose to demonstrate how the Ancient Greek and Latin Sembank, a corpus of semantically annotated Greek and Latin texts (https://github.com/wmshort/greek-and-latin-sembank) will meet this challenge. The AGLS uses WordNet concepts (synsets, semfields) to specify the senses of words in context. Recognizing that texts are open to a plurality of interpretations, its annotation scheme incorporates mechanisms for accommodating multiple simultaneous or competing interpretations, using the constructs of semtagm and reading to represent meaning-bearing textual units and alternative interpretations at this level. I will illustrate the flexibility and power of this system to capture even ‘unlimited semiosis’ through examples of mark-up from Greek and Latin literature.

 

Sophia Sklaviadis

Machine Learning Metadata

I will present a new application to the Perseus Digital Library corpus of a recent model of latent syntax, called Recurrent Neural Network Grammar (RNNG) (Dyer el al. 2015, 2016). An RNNG is a probabilistic syntax-based language model that models simultaneously both tokens and their tree-based composition. An RNNG defines a probability distribution over string terminals (words) and pairwise dependency structure relations. In a simple translation task setting, Bradbury and Socher (2017) uses Dyer’s RNNG architecture for predicting syntactic structure with a softmax over three LSTMs (a buffer with all the words to be parsed, a stack with partially built parses, and a list of parser previous actions). Syntax is modeled in latent modules on both encoder and decoder sides in a translation task. In a multi-task setting, with a separate parsing task (trained on the Universal Dependencies corpus for Ancient Greek) added to translation, I will further add as a third task authorship attribution in the multi-task model. The authorship attribution task, given a Greek sentence to predict the author, can be interpreted as an implicitly time/location-sensitive model. One way to capture individual authors’ syntactic characteristics is to train a model in a three-task setting, neural parsing of Greek source sentences (using Dyer’s discriminative RNNG model), translation to English (using Socher’s double latent syntax model), and as a third task to predict who is the author of a given sentence. The goal is to train a unified model that permits comparison of syntax across authors (in terms of the difference between optimal parser parameters for two given authors), and implicitly across time. Intuitively, it seems appealing to try to discriminate syntactic properties and characteristics on an author-by-author basis.

 

 

THEMATIC SESSIONS:
book epigrams

 

Julián Bértola

Book epigrams, verse scholia and some limit cases: versified paratexts on historiography and their interplay

In this paper I will explore how versified colophons can contribute to a better understanding of verse scholia, my main research interest. While still being book epigrams lato sensu, verse scholia constitute a special type of book epigrams since they normally comment on particular passages of the main text next to which they are copied. During my work with unedited cycles of verse scholia, the co-occurrence in manuscripts of a more common type of book epigrams, namely colophons, has proven to be of great help to better grasp the context of production of verse scholia.

The first case study is a long poem in hexameters (https://www.dbbe.ugent.be/types/6177), a scribal epigram addressed to a patron of high rank. This, I will argue, can explain some features of the verse scholia that co-occur with this book epigram in two manuscripts of Herodotus from the 15th century. The court circulation of the manuscript from which these derive accounts for a certain didactic, mirror-of-princes tone of the verse scholia. The second case study is a shorter dodecasyllabic epigram at the end of Vindobonensis Hist. gr. 53, a famous manuscript of Niketas Choniates. The colophon attests to the restoration of the manuscript on behalf of the bishop of Ainos. This information supports formal evidence from the verse scholia that are copied in this manuscript, as they largely reproduce the wording of the chronicle in verse by Ephraim of Ainos. The manuscript and possibly its exemplar were in Ainos where Ephraim or a member of his milieu copied the verse scholia. To conclude, I will present some limit cases (Vat. gr. 163 f. 168v and https://www.dbbe.ugent.be/occurrences/17771): book epigrams that refer to specific passages, but do not correspond in full to the typology of verse scholia because of their position in the manuscript, their layout and their content.

 

Julie Boeten

The focus in and on book epigrams: A pragmatic investigation of object clitic pronouns and the topic-focus pair in Byzantine book epigrams

The book epigrams in the Database of Byzantine Book Epigrams have formed the corpus for my doctorial research in the past couple of years. Indeed, a sub-database was even designed specifically for my purposes, which is linked to the larger DBBE database. In this sub-database I have tagged a number of features, one of which are the object clitic pronouns (OCPs). These are the pronouns in their clitic form, when they are in an object position, such as με , σοι or του. The reason why these OCPs are an interesting word group to tag, is because they are important signallers of information structure.

The tagging in the DBBE has yielded some interesting results concerning the distribution of OCPs in the Medieval Greek language of book epigrams. It is generally agreed upon that the unmarked, ‘normal’ position of the OCP in both Ancient and Mevieval Greek is (immediately) following the verb. However, a large amount of OCPs in the DBBE are preverbal. What exactly is going here?

The so-called focus hypothesis suggests that there may a pragmatic explanation for this. Indeed, focalized information is usually attracted into a preverbal position, which may be the reason for this distribution of OCPs in the DBBE. In this paper, we will have a closer look at this and consider the possible ramifications for Medieval Greek word order in general.

 

Sien De Groot

Reading and Writing the Areopagite. Book Epigrams as Witnesses to the Transmission of the Corpus Dionysiacum

coming soon

 

Luise Marion Frenkel

The reputation of late-antique authors on the Byzantine folio

In order to assess how text-related book epigrams could influence Byzantine readers and audiences, this paper compares the book epigrams in manuscripts containing works by authors directly involved in the main theological controversies from the fourth to seventh century. It stands out that while DBBE lists only three book epigrams for Athanasius of Alexandria, of which only two are text-related and, for that matter, very formulaic, and among the eleven manuscripts containing works by Cyril of Alexandria with book epigrams, most are about the scribe or patron, seventeen manuscripts with works by Theodoret of Cyrrhus have book epigrams, including a number of text-related poems with a dozen verses or more. Focusing on the main authors of the fifth- century Christological controversies, this paper will present the analysis of the text-related book epigrams in relation to the narratives associated to the authors at that time. Were the book epigrams defending the texts, orienting the interpretation of the content, or, as in the case of the titles in Coptic multiple-text manuscripts, quite freely addressing contemporary debates in which it was customary to refer to passages from the work?

 

Jacopo Marcon

Παῦλος ὁ μύστης τῶν ἀπορρήτων λόγων: on the use of the book epigrams in New Testament Catenae on Paul

This paper aims to investigate the use of epigrams in the Byzantine New Testament Catenae, with a particular focus on the catenary manuscripts of the Pauline Epistles. I will analyze the position, the structure, the content and the function of the byzantine book epigrams with the purpose of revealing new interesting features in the history of Catenae and commentaries on Paul. 

First, I will generally introduce the New Testament Catenae. These are biblical manuscripts with the text of the New Testament alongside the exegetical chain of comments made up of multiple extracts from the Greek Church Fathers. Second, I will consider the so-called paratextual features of the biblical Catenae on the Pauline Epistles, where most of the book epigrams are present (the Euthalian Apparatus and the set of prefaces and subscriptions). 

In doing so, I will investigate two main types of book epigrams. For the first typology, that of the so- called text- or author-related epigrams, I will examine the cases of Paris, BnF, Gr. 219, 224, and Coisl. 217 and Venice, BNM, Gr. Z 34 (coll. 349). In these manuscripts, alongside the text of the preface on the Pauline epistles in verses (ή τών έπιστολών ύπόθεσις διά ίάμβων), short book epigrams open the text of each of the Epistles. In some other manuscripts, book epigrams accompany miniatures of Paul and John Chrysostom (Paris, BnF, Gr. 223), and of Paul, Oecumenius and Theodoret of Cyr (Paris, BnF, Gr. 224), or can be incorporated into the text of the colophons (i.e. Vatican City, BAV, Bar. Gr. 503, with the subscription of John Pepagomenos). 

Finally, my paper explores the content and the textual tradition of some epigrams that have been overlooked, in Paris, BnF, Gr. 237, including one which seems to have been written in Arabic or Turkish but with Greek letters.

 

Renaat Meesters & Raf Praet

Terra Incognita? Latin Book Epigrams

Since its inception in 2010, the Database of Byzantine Book Epigrams (DBBE) has disclosed an important corpus of mediaeval Greek texts to the academic community, shedding new light on a plethora of aspects of Byzantine culture. Regrettably, there is currently no similar project for the collection, cataloguing and edition of metrical paratexts written in Latin. Despite some examples of Latin epigrams which have received a certain measure of attention, this considerable corpus remains seriously understudied.

The purpose of this paper is to make a broad panoramic sketch of the nature of this unknown corpus based on a case study. We will present a preliminary inventory of the Latin metrical paratexts from the approximately 670 manuscripts in the possession of the Abbey library of Saint Gall (Switzerland).

This paper consists of two parts. First, we will give a statistic analysis of the presence of metrical paratexts in the Abbey library of Saint Gall. This analysis serves to sketch, by means of careful extrapolation, the vague contours of the corpus of Latin metrical paratexts. Secondly, we will devote this paper to several interesting samples of Latin metrical paratexts from the Abbey library, focusing on a comparative point of view. The following questions will be addressed:

  • Questions of categorisation and classification; are the categories used by the DBBE for Greek metrical paratexts valid for their Latin counterparts? Are there grounds for maintaining the theoretical distinction between occurrence and type, or do Latin book epigrams display a greater individuality than Greek epigrams? Can we classify Latin epigrams according to their relation to author, image, patron, reader, scribe and text? In which metres were Latin book epigrams written?
  • Questions of differences and similarities in book culture; are there significant dissimilarities between both corpora and what is the significance of these distinctions for assessing contrasts between the Byzantine and western mediaeval book cultures?
  • Questions of influences and overlaps; can we perceive, in the presented cases, overlaps and/or mutual influences between both corpora, and how did they come about? Can we speak of a common origin in (late) antique book culture or can we pinpoint any direct points of contact between Byzantium and the Latin west for explaining textual similarities?

 

Alessandra Palla

Manuscript Tradition and Cultural Perspectives: Investigating the Epigrams AP 2, vv. 372-376 and AP 9, 583

The aim of my research is to provide a literary and critical analysis of the epigrams AP 2, vv. 372-376 and AP 9, 583, as transmitted by the manuscripts that contain Thucydides’ Historiae, the so-called Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ Opuscula Rhetorica, and (in some cases) Marcellinus’ Vita Thucydidis, along with an anonymous Vita about the historian.

Building on Gallavotti’s work, the first stage of my paper focuses on a preliminary study of manuscripts that have not yet been examined by scholars of the aforementioned epigrams’ transmission: the Berolinensis gr. qu. 71, considered lost after World War II but in fact preserved in the Jagellonian Library in Krakow, the history of which I have already investigated, as well as other manuscripts including Athous Lavras Η 99 (saec. XIV in., ca. 1300), Parisinus gr. 1733 (saec. XIV in.), and Mosquensis Musei Historici Synodalis gr. 510 (216/CCXVII), dated from between the middle of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th century.

In the second stage, I analyze and reconstruct the epigrams’ manuscript tradition, combining textual aspects with the epigrams’ position within the manuscripts.

This research will provide a basis from which to develop a thorough and detailed study not only of the manuscript tradition of the epigrams AP 2, vv. 372-376 and AP 9, 583 but also of their intellectual, cultural and historical function.

 

Georgi Parpulov

A Typology of Metrical Paratexts

My talk will propose a schematic classification of Greek metrical paratexts that will hopefully be questioned and discussed by other conference participants. First, I distinguish between those metrical paratexts which have a more or less precise (potential or actual) prose equivalent and those which are essentially poetic and thus irreducible to prose. Second, there are metrical paratexts which refer to a book or to its contents and author, and there are Bildepigramme which pertain to images and thus need not necessarily occur in manuscript form. Bildepigramme can be further subdivided into ‘interior’ (i.e. as if spoken by a person whom the image depicts) and ‘exterior’ (as if spoken by the image’s viewer). The above points will be purposely illustrated with examples which have not found a place in Prof. Rhoby’s recent corpus.

 

Manolis Patedakis

Epigrams from a manuscript book, to a fresco “manuscript”: Tetrastichs on the Old and New Testament by Theodore Prodromos

In the last decades, a significant number of Theodore Prodromos’ epigrams, from his collection of Tetrastichs on the New Testament, have been identified as inscriptions, accompanying paintings –especially frescos, in several churches– or other works of art. In this paper, having used as a starting point such a case of an already published inscription with a poem of Prodromos, in a church of the Venetian Period of Crete (Panagia at Meronas), I will initially examine the relation of Prodromos’ collection with a specific illuminated manuscript, a Tetraevangelon –now, preserved in Mytilene, Greece–, which is dated approximately to the end of the 12th and the first decades of the 13th century. The relation between Prodromos’ poetry and the art of painting has already been a research topic in recent literature. I will further tackle the issue on such a relation of his Tetrastichs with visual arts, as certain images are transmitted both through wall and other paintings, and manuscript illuminations. It is worth to examine why Prodromos’ particular type of poetry was selected in order to be placed side by side with images. Was this a choice activated after the completion of his poetic collection, or was it included in the original plan of the poet himself? Do the aesthetics and the spirit of the poems –Tetrastichs both on the Old and New Testament– encourage their adoption as a comment on images? Certainly, research on such a topic involves further study not only on the literary aspects in Prodromos’ poetry but also its relation to the visual culture, both in books and monuments, in Byzantium and beyond.

 

Aglae Pizzone

Voices from the 12th century: the book epigrams of the Voss. Gr. Q1

The Vossianus Gr. Q1 is the most significant known testimony of John Tzetzes’ commentary on Aphthonius’ and Hermogenes’ treatises, written in political verse. Tzetzes’ commentary, still lacking a modern edition, played a crucial role in the life of the author as well as in the cultural economy of 12th-century Constantinople, as shown by the Historiai. The Leiden Universty Library catalogue still dates the manuscript to the late 13th-early 14th century. However, on paleographical grounds the main handwriting of the manuscript points to an earlier period, closer to the life of the author. Paleographical analysis is supported by a close reading of the rich paratexts – both in prose and verse – accompanying Tzetzes’ commentary. This paper focuses on the hexametric book epigrams on f. 30 v. and 211 v. (DBBE occurrences 19741, 19742). It also provides a complete edition of the 24-line poem in dodecasyllables on ff. 211v-212r. (DBBE occurrence 19743), presenting Tzetzes’ intellectual endeavor as Hercuelan labor and dovetailing nicely with the overall authorial persona conveyed by both the paratexts and the commentary. Here the exegete is consistently depicted as a trailblazing poet-hero with Odyssean overtones. Equally, paratexts steadily describe the production of both the work and its manuscript as suspended between gift- and market-economy. In the prose “colophon” (the text marks the end of the commentary proper but not the end of this manuscript, probably mirroring a previous copy) on f. 212r, moreover, details are provided on the editorial phases leading to the production of the manuscript, including invaluable information on the role of the commissioners, the way the text was copied and the level of agency of the author vis a vis his patrons. Finally, I will show that the book epigram on 212r (DBBE occurrence 19745) introduces nothing less than a section on Aphthonius and Hermogenes from the Logismoi, a work by Tzetzes previously considered lost, thus further proving that the Vossianus is an editorial product extremely close to Tzetzes’ environment.

 

Andreas Rhoby

Verse and Image: the Kosmos of Byzantine Metrical Paratexts

The production of verse in Byzantium was immense. What is left represents only the tip of the iceberg of the poetic production of Byzantine intellectuals. Writing verses (as opposed to writing prose) was not necessarily considered to be something special, as is the case in our modern conception of literature. In Byzantium, a considerable part of the literary production belongs to the genre of so-called paratexts, i.e. texts that accompany or refer to a main text. These paratexts, a huge amount of them composed in verse, occur in manuscripts (often in connection with images) but also as inscriptions. For example, verses accompanying portraits in fresco painting are also paratexts insofar as they accompany an image which represents the center of the composition. 

In my presentation, I will discuss the interaction of images and accompanying verses in manuscripts, on fresco paintings and on other media. My lecture will reveal how carefully planned was the production and the layout of images with verses in manuscripts and other media, and how one medium influenced the other. The kosmos of Byzantine metrical paratexts is as wide and colorful as the kosmos (‘adornment’) of images and illuminations and their accompanying verses.

 

Lev Shadrin

“Телос вивлос”: the dissemination of the ὥσπερ ξένοι book epigram in Old Russian manuscript colophons

coming soon

 

Nina Sietis

Writing Manuscripts, Adding Epigrams

In this paper, I will focus on the link between book epigrams and the history of manuscripts. In particular, I will present some cases in which the study of the palaeographic aspects of an epigram reveal precious details about the history of the book itself, but also about the main text preserved together with the epigrams. The first part of the speech will have a philological approach: I will prove that a writer added the same epigram on two witnesses of the works of Dionysius the Areopagite, thus confirming that the two manuscripts belonged to the same textual family (Lond. Add. MS 36821 and Vat. gr. 1525). The second part of the speech will be devoted to the presentation of the main writer of a manuscript preserved in Milan (Ambr. C 82 sup.), who also added some epigrams on other manuscripts; after presenting the epigrams and a type not included in the DBBE, I will try to reconstruct this writer’s identity and his cultural frame.

 

Maria Tomadaki

Book Epigrams by Cretan Scribes and Scholars: Manuscript Production and Culture in Crete during the 14th and 15th Centuries

The majority of the known book epigrams composed by Cretans are dated to the 14-15th c. and originate from Chandax or places near to ancient Gortyna and to the steep Asterousia Mountains in Southern Crete. The evidence testifies the beginning of the flourishing of culture in the island during the late Byzantine period, which reached its peak the subsequent centuries, during the so-called Cretan Renaissance. Although Crete was under Venetian rule in 14-15th c., it continued to preserve well-established Byzantine traditions and to be influenced by the Byzantine ideology. Functioning as a bridge between Constantinople and Italy, Crete played a significant role to the production of manuscripts and to the transmission of Greek knowledge in the West, especially after the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. Cretan scholars were transcribing manuscripts either for personal use or for important commissioners (e.g., the cardinal Bessarion). At the same time they were actively participating in the main theological controversy of the time, namely the Union of the Catholic with the Eastern Orthodox Church.

In this paper I will first present book epigrams of theological manuscripts, which were copied by unknown or well-known historical figures such as the anti-Unionist theologian Joseph Philagris (14th c.). I will then continue by discussing representative book epigrams of secular manuscripts, which were written by professional Unionist scribes working for Bessarion, for instance by Georgios Tribizias (15th c.) and Ioannes Plousiadenos (15th c.). Lastly, I will focus on an epigram on the Batrachomyomachia composed by Michael Apostolis (15th c.), an important Byzantine scholar, teacher, and copyist, who emigrated to Crete after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople. My aim is to explore and discuss the epigrams’ textual problems, their motifs, function and the provenance of their manuscripts. I also intend to highlight book epigrams’ role as katoptra reflecting aspects of the local cultural history and manuscript production.

 

Emmanuel Van Elverdinghe

The Copyist and the Evangelist: Epigrams in Armenian Manuscripts of the Gospels

Just like their Greek counterparts, Armenian manuscripts enjoy a rich and diverse tradition of book epigrams. This paper illustrates some differences between both traditions, based on the case of Gospel books. Compared to Byzantine tetraevangelia, which regularly exhibit different cycles of epigrams dedicated to the four evangelists, Armenian Gospel books seem to draw on a much more limited pool of equivalent cycles. Moreover, such conventional epigrams are not as frequently attested in Armenian as they are in Greek. What distinguishes Armenian, on the other hand, is a propensity towards variation and extension of these cycles, where the emphasis usually shifts from the evangelist to the copyist. In the same vein, Armenian Gospel books reveal a sheer quantity of unique compositions that form the bulk of Armenian book epigrams (and have been traditionally treated as metrical colophons). Many revolve around the persona of the scribe, but when they are more closely related to the evangelists, they develop mostly the same themes as in Greek epigrams.

 

Simon Zuenelli

The Ancient Legacy of the Byzantine Book Epigram

As the DBBE effectively shows, the production of book epigrams was indeed a popular phenomenon in the Byzantine Middle Ages. Yet, the book epigram is not a Byzantine invention, but rooted in a long tradition going as far back as the Hellenistic period. The history of the ancient book epigram is currently being investigated in the project “The Ancient Greek Book Epigram”, funded by the Austrian Science Fund and carried out at Innsbruck University. In my paper, I would like to present some of the results gained so far, which can lead to a better understanding of the evolution of the Byzantine book epigram tradition. Accordingly, my paper will highlight the continuity of book epigram production between Antiquity and the Middle Ages. More specifically, after a brief general introduction to the ancient Greek book epigram, the paper will firstly deal with the continuity on a generic level. To this end, the type of the ancient “scribe-related epigram”, where the aspect of continuity is particularly visible, will be discussed. Secondly, two important issues related to the practice of Byzantine book epigram production will be addressed, namely the question of visual presentation and that of textual fluidity (or textual recycling). Taking P.Lond.Lit 11 as an example, several striking parallels with the ancient book epigram tradition in regards of both phenomena will be presented. Finally, a rather special form of ancient legacy will be investigated, that being the continuous use of ancient book epigrams in Byzantine manuscripts. This analysis will eventually lead to the general discussion of how to determine the “origin” of single Byzantine book epigrams.