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Accounts of Medieval Constantinople
The Patria
Albrecht Berger
Harvard University Press, 2013
The Patria is a fascinating four-book collection of short historical notes, stories, and legends about the buildings and monuments of Constantinople, compiled in the late tenth century by an anonymous author who made ample use of older sources. It also describes the foundation and early (pre-Byzantine) history of the city, and includes the Narrative on the Construction of Hagia Sophia, a semi-legendary account of Emperor Justinian I's patronage of this extraordinary church (built between 532 and 537). The Patria constitutes a unique record of popular traditions about the city, especially its pagan statues, held by its medieval inhabitants. At the same time it is the only Medieval Greek text to present a panorama of the city as it existed in the middle Byzantine period. Despite its problems of historical reliability, the Patria is still one of our main guides for the urban history of medieval Constantinople. This translation makes the entire text of the Patria accessible in English for the first time.
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Amphoteroglossia
A Poetics of the Twelfth-Century Medieval Greek Novel
Panagiotis Roilos
Harvard University Press, 2005
This work offers the first systematic and interdisciplinary study of the poetics of the twelfth-century medieval Greek novel. This book investigates the complex ways in which rhetorical theory and practice constructed the overarching cultural aesthetics that conditioned the production and reception of the genre of the novel in twelfth-century Byzantine society. By examining the indigenous rhetorical concept of amphoteroglossia, this book probes unexplored aspects of the re-inscription of inherited allegorical, comic, and rhetorical modes in the Komnenian novels, and offers new methodological directions for the study of Byzantine secular literature in its cultural complexities. The creative re-appropriation of the established generic conventions of the ancient Greek novel by the medieval Greek novelists, it is argued in this wide-ranging study, has invested these works with a dynamic dialogism. In this book, Roilos shows that this interdiscursivity functions on two pivotal axes: on the paradigmatic axis of previously sanctioned ancient Greek and—less evidently but equally significantly—Christian literature, and on the syntagmatic axis of allusions to the broader twelfth-century Byzantine cultural context.
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Animal Fables of the Courtly Mediterranean
The Eugenian Recension of Stephanites and Ichnelates
Alison Noble
Harvard University Press, 2022

Animal Fables of the Courtly Mediterranean is a treasure trove of stories and lessons on how to conduct oneself and succeed in life, sometimes through cleverness rather than virtue. They feature human and many animal protagonists, including the two jackals Stephanites and Ichnelates, after whom the book is named, as well as several lion kings. At the heart of this work are tales from the Sanskrit Panchatantra and Mahabharata, to which more were added, both in the original Middle Persian collection and its eighth-century Arabic translation, the widely known Kalīla wa-Dimna.

In the eleventh century, readers in Constantinople were introduced to these stories through an abbreviated Greek version, translated by Symeon Seth from the Arabic. The new Byzantine Greek text and English translation presented here is a more complete version, originating in twelfth-century Sicily and connected with Admiral Eugenius of Palermo. It contains unique prefaces and reinstates the prologues and stories omitted by Seth.

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Armenia and the Byzantine Empire
A Brief Study of Armenian Art and Civilization
Sirarpie der Nersessian
Harvard University Press


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