Andrea Massimo Cuomo and Erich Trapp, eds. Toward a Historical Sociolinguistic Poetics of Medieval Greek. Byzantioς. Studies in Byzantine History and Civilization (SBHC 12). Brepols, 2017.

From Brepols

This volume collects some of the papers presented at two international conferences, held in Vienna, on historical sociolinguistics and late Byzantine historiography.

How can historical sociolinguistic analyses of Medieval Greek aid in the interpretation of Medieval Greek texts? This is the main question addressed by the papers collected in this volume. Historical sociolinguistics (HSL) is a discipline that combines linguistic, social, historical, and philological sciences, and suggests that a language cannot be studied apart from its social dimension. Similarly, the study of a language in its social dimension is nothing else than the study of communication between members of a given speech community by means of written texts, the shared "signs" used by authors to communicate with their audiences.

This volume is divided into two parts. In the first, Andrea Cuomo’s and Klaas Bentein’s papers aim to offer an overview of the discipline and examples of applied HSL. Stefano Valente’s, Daniele Bianconi’s, and Inmaculada Pérez-Martín’s papers show how the context of production and reception of Byzantine texts should be studied. These are followed by Geoffrey Horrocks’ study on some features of Atticized Medieval Greek. In the second part, the contributions by Ioannis Telelis, Paolo Odorico, and Divna Manolova focus on the context of reception of texts by Georgios Pachymeres, Theodoros Pediasimos, and Nikephoros Gregoras respectively.