Poetry and Its Contexts in Eleventh-century Byzantium

Book excerpt: Byzantine poetry of the eleventh century is fascinating, yet underexplored terrain. This book, the first collaborative book-length study on the topic, takes an important step to fill this gap. It brings together specialists of the period who delve into this poetry with different but complementary objectives in mind, covering the links between art and text, linguistic evolutions, social functionality, contemporary reading attitudes, and the like. The authors aim to give the production of 11th-century verse a place in the Byzantine genre system and in the historic evolution of Byzantine poetry and metrics. As a result, this book will, to use the expression of two important poets of the period, offer a small taste of what can be gained from the serious study of this period.