The Late Byzantine Romance in Context

Narrativity and Identities in the Mediterranean (13th–16th Centuries)

Ioannis Smarnakis, Zissis D. Ainalis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781032325675
• eBook ISBN: 9781040021194
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book investigates issues of identity and narrativity in late Byzantine romances in a Mediterranean context, covering the chronological span from the capture of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204 to the 16th century. It includes chapters not only on romances that were written and read in the broader Byzantine world but also on literary texts from regions around the Mediterranean Sea.

The volume offers new insights and covers a variety of interrelated subjects concerning the narrative representations of self-identities, gender, and communities, the perception of political and cultural otherness, and the interaction of space and time with identity formation. The chapters focus on texts from the Byzantine, western European, and Ottoman worlds, thus promoting a cross-cultural approach that highlights the role of the Mediterranean as a shared environment that facilitated communications, cultural interaction, and the trading and reconfiguration of identities.

The volume will appeal to a wide audience of researchers and students alike, specializing in or simply interested in cultural studies, Byzantine, western medieval, and Ottoman history and literature.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• 1 Introduction: a) Identities and narrativity in a Mediterranean context (13th–16th centuries): a brief introduction
• 2 The narrator’s voice: narrative and representation of the self in the Late Byzantine romances
• 3 Western cultural ways and their perception in Palaiologan narratives: some cases from historiography and vernacular romances
• 4 The Forty Viziers and the Ottoman sultans: offering advice and expressing critique in the 1440s
• 5 East and the eastern other in the imaginary of Byzantine romance
• 6 An “emperor” under the guise of a Moses: narrative representations of the East in Philippe de Mézières’ Songe du viel pelerin
• 7 Narrative representations of space in the tale of Imperios and Margarona: constructing the image of a “global” mediterranean for a popular audience
• 8 Fathers, sons and brothers: the succession to the throne and the construction of masculinities in Velthandros and Chrysantza and Kallimachos and Chrysorrhoe
• 9 The virgin and the soldier, the monk and the whore: gendered metonymy and confessional resistance in the post-Byzantine world
• Index