The Byzantine paraphrases of Gregory of Nazianzus’ poems Understandings and Misunderstandings

doctoral seminar poetry in the medieval world resized

Image credit: MET Museum

 

Tuesday 24 September 2024, 3pm

Register via Eventbrite.

 

This event is part of the ongoing Doctoral Seminar ‘Projecting Poetry’ and will be held online on Teams. 

Registration closes 2 days before the start of the event. You will be sent the joining link within 48 hours of the event, on the day and once again 15 minutes before the event starts.

For further information, you can contact Ugo Mondini at ugo.mondini@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk.

Speaker: Georgios Gousgouriotis, PhD Candidate, School of Philology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

Gregory of Nazianzus (ca. AD 330-390) became the most imitated Christian author. His poems were widely read in Byzantium, and were part of the educational practice. Nevertheless, their classicising language was barely intelligible to Byzantine pupils. Thus, the paraphrases of such poems were useful in the classroom. These paraphrases are helpful for the edition of the poems by Gregory of Nazianzus because they provide important evidence for the classification of the extant manuscripts and support good readings for the text of Gregoryʼ poems. They could also be regarded as valuable evidence for the circulation and use of the original texts. My PhD research focuses on the Byzantine paraphrases of Gregoryʼs poems. The main aim of my presentation is to offer various aspects of the reception of such poems in Byzantium, by focusing on understandings and misunderstandings of Gregoryʼ poems in their extant Byzantine paraphrases.


Poetry in the Medieval World Network