The Byzantine Historiographical Prefaces (4th-15th Centuries)

A Study on Praxis and Culture of Writing History in Byzantium

Kiapidou, Eirene-Sophia

Over the last few decades, a fruitful scholarly debate has developed concerning the specific features of the genre of Byzantine historiography, within which the tendency to treat historical texts mainly as pleasant literary narratives and less as organized recordings of Byzantine political and military history has been on the rise. The present study intends to contribute to this debate by returning to the voice of the Byzantine authors themselves; by focusing on the preserved historical prefaces of the Early, Middle and Late Byzantine era. This initiative seemed timely, more than a century after the publication of ?einrich Lieberich’s fundamental work on Byzantine historical proems . Obviously, the prefaces are not all of equal interest. Some are written to fulfil a purely conventional function, while others were apparently composed more thoughtfully and merit more careful attention. The book’s goal is twofold: firstly, to outline the details of the prefatory function and features of the Byzantine historiographical proems as micro–texts; secondly, to detect and evaluate the theoretical views expressed by their authors on the genre of Byzantine historiography. It is expected that this will expand our knowledge of how the Byzantines thought (culture) and wrote (praxis) about historiography.