Martin Hinterberger – författare

The Routledge Handbook of Rewriting in Byzantium presents an overview of the various rewriting processes involved in the production of Byzantine literature. Due to the lack of recent systematic research on the totality of Byzantine literature, which embraces a long millennium of texts, the fluid concept of ‘rewriting’, here studied for the first time in all its complexity, serves as a unifying criterion for understanding the literary task of the Byzantines. Literature in Byzantium went well beyond the problems of language and genre and was adapted according to the audience and the expectations of the readers, which varied greatly in different periods.With contributions from 25 scholars, this book analyses and discusses a variety of topics, including the rewriting of the past, modes of persuasion as a driving force behind rewriting, changing muses, the adaptation of hagiography to changing patterns of behaviour, updating of technical texts, and the necessity for theological and philosophical reinterpretation of inherited texts.This book will appeal to students and scholars alike interested in Byzantine literature, culture, and literary methods.

This volume presents, for the first time, a critical edition of a highly unusual Byzantine text: the Metaphrase – or intralingual translation – of the early 13th-century History (Chronike Diegesis) of Niketas Choniates. The original History of Choniates has always been considered a monument of Byzantine historical and rhetorical discourse. Its highly learned, Atticizing style of Greek, however, frequently made it obscure to readers, even in the Byzantine period. As a result, in the second quarter of the 14th century, probably in Constantinople, an individual or group of individuals undertook to transpose the entire work into a simpler register of Greek, closer to the everyday language of the period. Accordingly, the text as published here brings to light a major body of primary linguistic material, enabling scholars in the field to judge for themselves the nature and extent of the linguistic and stylistic enterprise represented by the Metaphrase. The introductory matter and accompanying analysis provide background information on the manuscript tradition of the Metaphrase, as well as an assessment of its linguistic and cultural context and genesis.

Twenty articles on Byzantine literature written in honour of W. Horander by colleagues are contained in this volume. They focus on his research interests, in particular epigrams and the literature of the Comnenan period, as well as the history of literary motifs, rhetoric and questions of literary language. Several contributions include editions of texts. The articles are written in German, English, French and Italian.