The novelty of approach in this book, which contains six texts from late tenth-century Byzantium, lies not only in offering well-constructed editions and parallel English translations of texts that have hitherto been deemed unworthy of such enterprise, but also in insisting on giving them a new generic label. The “novels” edited and translated in this wonderful volume from the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library have for a long time lived a humble life as rhetorical redactions of old saints’ lives—in other words, as rewritten hagiography of no use to historians and of hardly more enjoyment for others.
However, this may now change simply by viewing these texts in a different context. By reading them as novels—and much supports such reading—and by listening to both the new tuning of old tales and their centuries’ long reception in Byzantium, we catch glimpses not only of a lived perception of ordinary life; of notions of gender, body, and sexuality; of imperial past and present, but also of literary brilliance.
Christian Høgel
Speculum
