CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2019
| Author | Kee, John Rutherford |
|---|---|
| Title | Narrating The Byzantine Border: Wilderness Landscape In Kekaumenos And Digenes Akrites |
| Summary | Using conceptual tools from cultural geography and narratology, this thesis argues that Byzantine literature contains much more complex and substantive engagement with the spaces of the empire’s periphery than has been recognized. It focuses on two texts which have always been acknowledged to display considerable interest in provincial life: the Advice and Anecdotes of Kekaumenos and the Grottaferrata version of Digenes Akrites. By adapting the rich cultural-geographic concept of “landscape” to the study of premodern narrative, however, this thesis demonstrates that their interest in the space of the borderlands is still deeper and richer than has been understood. The argument proceeds in three stages. The first addresses the most “stereotyped” environment of all, the idyllic locale of the classical locus amoenus. It shows how Digenes plays on this space’s associations with practical advice about the correct site for a military camp—relayed also by Kekaumenos—to integrate this motif into the wilderness of the frontier. The second explores how that wilderness is presented by Kekaumenos. It suggests that he combines narrative techniques from historiography with advice inherited from earlier military treatises to teach the unique perspective of an experienced general, the way such a commander “reads” the land. The final chapter treats Digenes’s wilderness in detail. It demonstrates how landscape there works in multiple ways—often in ones directly antithetical to Kekaumenos’s—in order to define its protagonist as a heroic lone warrior, not a general. In all these cases, this thesis suggests that landscape implicates more than simply terrain. It serves also as a means by which these texts to present larger, otherwise purely notional spaces, such as the imagined worlds of literary traditions or the imperial-political geography of the border. The thesis concludes by suggesting how this insight might be extended to the study of Byzantine literature more generally. |
| Supervisor | Menze, Volker; van den Berg, Baukje |
| Department | Medieval Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2019/kee_john.pdf |
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