Thoughts on the Recent Past and the Future of Byzantine Literary Studies

Abstract

This brief postscript evaluates the place of Byzantine literature in the academy, and evaluates its current strengths. It looks back at a period when professors of Byzantine literature disparaged their subject matter, and it contrasts that era (c. 1970) with the position fifty years later, as large numbers of young scholars enter the field and are employed to do so, and to whom major research grants are awarded. The chapter locates itself in relation to other position papers written by the author in 1990, 2003, and 2010, and surveys the past twenty years in terms of conferences, publications, and other infrastructure, emphasizing the growth of texts, translations, and studies, and work on processes of literary production. It notes the confident place of rhetoric as the foundation of literary achievement in every genre and the arrival at a more nuanced periodization. Research has been informed by affective and cognitive neuroscience as well as by new philology, new historicism, post-classical narratology, and comparative approaches; it applauds the way that texts in Syriac, Arabic, Georgian, Armenian, and Latin are regarded as having a claim to be considered as Byzantine. It proposes a history of Byzantine literature.