Byzantium Within a Medieval Eurafricasian Literary Polysystem: Historiography, Fictional Tales, and the Practices of Narrative Representation

Byzantium and its literature has been excluded from the national canons of European literatures. While there are some obvious reasons for this exclusion in the 18th–19th century, it is woth noting that also Byzantinists supported this exclusion by promoting the alterity of Byzantine culture in relation to “Medieval Europe.” The talk will examine two types of entangled premodern narratives as examples which show the application of new criteria that would allow us to think inclusively in terms of broader “medieval” literary polysystems and the various regional/transregional systems that operated within them. Two such “story spaces” will be used: the Eurafricasian and the Hindosinonipponese polysystems. The first example will look at the various forms of historiography during the periods AD 700–900 and 1000–1200, while the second example will focus on erotic tales between 1000–1300. The texts cover a broad spectrum of languages (Byzantine Greek, Medieval Latin, Middle High German, Old French, Arabic, New Persian and Early Japanese). The comparison, part of a narrative history of Byzantine literature – will use structural, thematic, stylistic and socio-cultural criteria with the aim of highlighting and explaining similarities and differences between the practices of narrative within the two medieval literary polysystems.

About the Speaker

Panagiotis Agapitos is since 2021 Fellow of Byzantine Studies at the Gutenberg Research College of the University of Mainz, having worked before that for 25 years at the University of Cyprus as Professor of Byzantine Literature and Culture in the Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies. He studied at the University of Munich and received his PhD from Harvard University in 1990. He has taught as visiting professor at the Free University of Berlin, the High School of Social Sciences in Paris, Stanford University and the Sapienza University of Rome. His research interests focus on Byzantine literature, the history of manuscripts and education in Byzantium, the critical edition of Medieval Greek texts, narratology, theory and practice of rhetoric, genre studies and cultural history. He has published over 90 papers on these topics, while his most recent book is a translation into English of the Tale of Livistros and Rodamne, a Byzantine love romance of the 13th century (Liverpool University Press, 2021). He is currently writing a narrative history of Byzantine literature (AD 300–1500) under contract with Cambridge University Press. In his free time he writes “mystery stories” set in ninth-century Byzantium.