Projects
Byzantine scholia on historians and the literature of marginalia: reading and writing practices in the margins of medieval Greek manuscripts Ghent University
The margins of medieval Greek manuscripts are often filled with annotations of all sorts, from systematic commentaries to occasional reactions of readers. This project aims to study Byzantine marginal texts in all their facets: the material features, the literary form and the cultural circumstances in which they were written. Byzantine scholia are triggered by the main text and at the same time loaded with the intentions of annotators, which ...
The Slavonic Metaphrasis of Byzantine Orthodoxy. A Digital Inventory of South Slavonic Translation Literature applied to Research on Translated Authority and Linked Texts KU Leuven
Medieval Slavonic literature consists mostly of translations of Byzantine Greek works. It is a normative literature deeply imbued with a sense of tradition and religious and textual orthodoxy, but at the same time it is the product of the inherently transformative process of translation (metaphrasis). With this project we address these normative and transformative tendencies that have shaped the textual culture of the Slavonic Middle Ages. We ...
Byzantine culture and literature KU Leuven
The research of Peter Van Deun, Full Professor of Greek Studies, focuses on the literary production of the Patristic period and the Byzantine period (300-1453). More in particular he prepares text editions of works which remained unpublished or are only available in old, unreliable editions; moreover he concentrates on Byzantine strategies for preserving and transmitting the knowledge of the past, especially by compiling anthological ...
Living texts. Historiography and literature in the early Byzantine Period Ghent University
The project draws attention to a specific phenomenon of Early Byzantine historiography, namely that many histories were repeatedly and thoroughly reworked by copyists or other authors and still continued to circulate under the name of their first author as if they were the unchanged work of that author, and uses this as a lense to assess how the use of the modern notion of ‘literature’ distorts our understanding of these texts.
Greek literature (incl. Byzantine) in Dutch translation: online repertory. KU Leuven
To support the teaching of Greek literature (both at secondary school and at the university) and contribute to its dissemination to the general public, I aim to develop an online repertory that surveys Dutch translations of Greek and Byzantine literature. The website will be open access.
Marc and his princess. The spiritual legacy of the Byzantine monk Markus(13th century) KU Leuven
Byzantine literature has preserved some texts containing very concrete guidelines to empresses and princesses how to live a pious Christian life. An excellent example is the oeuvre of Markos the Monk, who was the spiritual director of Princess Irene-Eulogia Palaiologina (2nd half of the 13th century). Mark's oeuvre includes a monumental, unedited, spiritual anthology compiled for Irene (600 pages), which hasn't been studies hitherto; the work ...
Miracle or Magic? The Figure of the 'Magos' in Byzantine Hagiography Ghent University
What is the difference between magic and miracle? Scholars today believe that it is not possible to reach clear definitions of ‘magic’ and ‘miracle’ capable of answering that question: theoretically, one cannot meaningfully differentiate between the two. However, for Christians of the first centuries and later, the distinction between magic and miracle was crucial. This does not mean they were not sensitive to the fluidity of the spheres of ...
Greek Mythography in the Byzantine World. Investigations into the Remnants of an Age-old Genre. KU Leuven
The proposed project seeks to shed light on the evolution of Greek mythography after antiquity, more particularly in the Byzantine era. Despite the common interest in classical mythology, the genre of mythography (“writing about myth”) did for a long time not receive the scholarly attention it deserved. During the past two decades, however, we have witnessed a revival of interest in this classical genre. The proliferation of studies about ...
Byzantine Book Epigrams: function and context of a genre in the margin Ghent University
This research project deals with Byzantine book epigrams. These are metrical paratexts, texts in verse that refer to a main text. This genre is
preserved in Medieval Greek manuscripts. The project aims at a better understanding
of Byzantine book epigrams, their characteristics, their function and their context.
Besides that the concept ‘poetry’ will be redefined. The concept ‘paratext’ will be
...