The beats of the pen: social contexts of reading and writing poetry in 11th-century Constantinople

This thesis investigates the production and reception of Byzantine poetry as social and cultural practices in a contemporary context. The texts under view are poems composed in the period from 1028 to 1081, predominantly by the three poets Christopher Mitylenaios, John Mauropous and Michael Psellos. The dissertation first seeks to elucidate the conceptual framework in which poetry was embedded, coming to the conclusion that ‘poet’ and ‘poetry’ were in the Byzantine eleventh century no separate categories used for contemporary texts written in verse. The writing of poetry was seen as part of the activities of an intellectual combining the roles of teacher, scholar and orator. Further, it is established that poetry circulated at first separately, on fugitive media, within a limited circle of peers. The dissertation also describes the ways in which the presentation of poems, in manuscript collections or otherwise, affects contemporary reading strategies. Further, the social aspects of writing poetry are investigated. In a society where intellectual qualities were put forward as essential competences of someone belonging to the elite, poems served to demonstrate those qualities. The dissertation makes clear that education was an important background for poetic production. Students composed poetry as exercises and teachers entered into competition with rivals, exchanging poems as tools to harm others’ reputations. Poetry was an apt tool to position oneself in the intellectual field: the poets followed different self-representational strategies to attain that goal. Approaching the problem of patronage of poetry, it is proposed that instead of a sustained system of commission, there was rather a continuous exchange of services, some of which could consist of a poem, which was frequently offered as a gift.