Houghton-Medieval Studies Lecture in Early Book History

Niels Gaul (A.G. Leventis Professor of Byzantine Studies, University of Edinburgh), Codex and Character: Byzantine Authors in/and their Books. Co-sponsored with Houghton Library.

Many Byzantine literati commissioned carefully curated, authorized selections of their own writings. Some of the less affluent wrote them in their own hand. They all sought to leave an almost living testimony of their “character,” of their rhetoricized selves, to posterity. A survey of such codices—including draft versions, apographs, and fragments—allows to throw literary life and authorial manuscript production in the medieval megalopolis of Constantinople into sharper relief while at the same time revealing shared concerns of authorship across medieval cultures; in this respect, comparative glances at medieval Latin and middle-period Chinese book history seem particularly promising.