Overview

In twelfth-century Byzantium, poetry played a key part in various contexts of textual production and consumption. One of the leading poets of this period was Theodoros Prodromos, whose surviving corpus comprises approximately 17,000 verses. Even though most of his poetry has been presented in modern critical editions, a group of his works has been overlooked by modern philologists and literary scholars alike. The selected corpus--conventionally designated as Miscellaneous Poems--consists of texts on various themes and in a wide range of genres, ranging from cycles of religious and secular epigrams to riddles, ethopoiiai, and works of a self-referential and essayistic nature. This book includes the first critical edition and study of these poems, accompanied by English translations and commentaries. Their study contributes to a more nuanced picture of Prodromos' intellectual profile, expanding his image as the 'poet laureate' of the Komnenian court and providing entirely new insights into his activity in the different settings of Constantinopolitan intellectual life. The book also sheds new light on the complex relationship between patronage and other aspects of literary activity and the circulation of the same text in different performative contexts.

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9780192886927

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Nikos Zagklas is Assistant Professor of Byzantine Language and Literature at the Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Vienna. He has published extensively on various topics related to Byzantine literary culture, with a special focus on twelfth-century poetry, questions of self-representation and literary patronage, and the relationship between prose and verse. His recent publications include the volume Middle and Late Byzantine Poetry: Texts and Contexts (ed. with A. Rhoby; Turnhout 2018) and the Brill Companion to Byzantine Poetry (ed. with W. Hörandner and A. Rhoby; Leiden 2019).

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