Courtly romances in Byzantium

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PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE This article was downloaded by: [Jewish National & University Library] On: 22 March 2011 Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 731753642] Publisher Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37- 41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Mediterranean Historical Review Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713636259 Courtly romances in Byzantium: A case study in reception Roderick Beaton a a Koraes Professor of Modem Greek and Byzantine History, Language, and Literature, King's College, London To cite this Article Beaton, Roderick(1989) 'Courtly romances in Byzantium: A case study in reception', Mediterranean Historical Review, 4: 2, 345 — 355 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/09518968908569577 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09518968908569577 Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

Transcript of Courtly romances in Byzantium

Page 1: Courtly romances in Byzantium

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

This article was downloaded by: [Jewish National & University Library]On: 22 March 2011Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 731753642]Publisher RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Mediterranean Historical ReviewPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713636259

Courtly romances in Byzantium: A case study in receptionRoderick Beatona

a Koraes Professor of Modem Greek and Byzantine History, Language, and Literature, King's College,London

To cite this Article Beaton, Roderick(1989) 'Courtly romances in Byzantium: A case study in reception', MediterraneanHistorical Review, 4: 2, 345 — 355To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/09518968908569577URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09518968908569577

Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf

This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial orsystematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply ordistribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.

The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contentswill be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug dosesshould be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss,actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directlyor indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

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Courtly Romances in Byzantium:A Case Study in Reception

RODERICK BEATON

It was Alain de Lille, during the 1170s, who first claimed the courtlyromance as a major export to the crusading East. In an often quotedpassage he boasted:

For whither have the wings of fame not taken the name of Arthurof Britain and made it popular? What Christian realm has it leftuntouched? Who indeed may not speak of Arthur of Britain,since he is almost better known to the peoples of Asia than to theBritons, as we are informed by our Pilgrims returning fromeastern parts? Orientals speak of him, occidentals speak of him,the whole world. Egypt speaks of him; the straits of the Bosporusare not silent.. . . His deeds are celebrated in Antioch, Armenia,Palestine.1

Despite its undoubted exaggeration, this testimony has been taken atface value, and has found superficial corroboration, at least, in theexistence of a number of Byzantine romances of the fourteenth andfifteenth centuries, translated or adapted from Western originals. Onlyone of these, it must be said, is Arthurian: the idiosyncratic translationof the 'Branor le Brun' episode in the romance of Palamedes, betterknown as Guiron le Courtois. The brief Greek text is known as "The OldKnight'.2 Of the other surviving Greek translations of Westernromances, Fleur et Blanchefleur was translated from Italian and theRoman de Troie from French in the fourteenth century; Pierre deProvence et la Belle Maguelonne was epitomized in a loose adaptation,probably from the French, in the fifteenth century; and the samecentury saw an adaptation of Apollonius of Tyre and a fairly closetranslation of Boccaccio's Theseid,3 both from the Italian. With theexception of the Arthurian fragment and the vast Roman de Troie(which must be the longest work of vernacular Greek produced beforethe twentieth century), all these originals appeared relatively late in theWest. And there are good reasons for supposing that the Greekversions were produced in Greek-speaking lands held by descendantsof the crusaders. There is some evidence to link the Fleur et Blanche-fleur translation with Morea under the Villehardouin dynasty;4 the

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Theseid was probably translated in Crete;5 we know of the existence of amanuscript of Tristan in Chios before the fifteenth century;6 and thelate date of the translation of Pierre de Provence makes it almost certainthat it could not have been produced within the Byzantine empire.7

Were these the only Greek romances of the period, it would be aneasy matter to conclude, as some scholars have recently tended to do,that this kind of secular, vernacular fiction in Greek was simply anextension of the fama volons of Arthur and the courtly tradition of theWest.8 But there also survive five original romances written in Greekduring the same period. And although precise dating has provedimpossible for any of these early texts in a form of Modern Greek, threeof these original romances certainly, and in all probability four of them,were in existence before the middle of the fourteenth century, the timewhen it appears that the earliest translations (of Flew and the Romande Troie) were made. The same evidence also allows us to place thecomposition of these three or four original romances fairly confidentlyin Byzantine Constantinople.9 Although there are evident signs ofinteraction later between these two groups of romances, original andtranslated, the impetus for the composition of original fiction invernacular Greek does not seem chronologically to have followed fromthe translation of comparable texts from the West.

Elsewhere I have examined in detail the nature of these romancesas literary texts and their close links to the Hellenistic novels (orromances) of ideal love and their revival in twelfth-century Byzantium;and I have also reviewed the evidence for some degree of assimilation,in these romances, of elements derived from the West.10 In particularattention has been drawn to vocabulary and technical terms in theseromances which betray Western 'influence'; and more importantlyCarolina Cupane, in a series of articles, has argued that certain 'motifs'in the later Byzantine romances, such as the portrayal of Eros as a kingin splendour and the allegorical role of the castle, are Western importa-tions, cunningly disguised and assimilated to the anterior Greek tradi-tion.11 Cupane's well-documented studies are exemplary in theirapproach, in that they do not seek to isolate specific 'sources' for the'influence' of Western literature on the Greek romances, but ratherto show how common currents in the West are adapted but subtlymodified by Byzantine writers who are far from being merely passive.But they also overstate their case because they underplay the extent towhich these Western 'motifs' are already present half-formed inthe Byzantine tradition by the mid-twelfth century. The only otherWestern connections that have been discussed in the original Greekromances of the fourteenth century are minor linguistic pointers,descriptions of dress and technical terms which can tell us little.

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For the rest of this paper I shall investigate further the relationshipbetween the romances originally written in vernacular Greek in thefourteenth century and the tradition of courtly romance in the West, interms oí reception, in the sense that the term has acquired in the writingsof Hans Robert Jauss and other modern theorists of literature.12 Theessence of Jauss's model, so far as it concerns this paper, is that theproduction of a new text, or of a new kind of text, is constituted by a newway of reading older texts, or alternatively by the reading of differentolder texts from those than had previously dominated the canon. Thewriter of a new text is not in any passive or pejorative sense 'influenced'by his reading; it is he who takes the initiative in determining whichmodels from the past will furnish him with a framework in which his newtexts will make sense. I therefore wish to argue that 'imitation' orallusion to other literary texts may in certain cases be proof of activeinnovation rather than of mere passive reflection. The original Greekromances of the fourteenth century pay homage in this way to thelearned Greek romances of the twelfth century, and beyond them, tothe prose novels written in Greek under the Roman empire in the firstcenturies CE. But in subtler, and less evident ways, I wish to argue, thewriters of these romances were also aware of and prepared to allude tothe courtly tradition of the West. And it is probably a more importantdiscovery that Byzantines in Constantinople were reading Westernsecular and vernacular literature, than that their counterparts in Latin-ruled lands were translating it.

I shall focus on three areas of contact between East and West forwhich there is evidence in the Byzantine romances: language andchoice of subject matter; narrative structure; and proper names andgeographical allusions. For the sake of simplicity I shall confine discus-sion to the three Greek texts which we know to have been writtenduring the first half of the fourteenth century, and to have circulatedin Constantinople during that time. They are Kallimachos and Chry-sorrhoe, Velthandros and Chrysantza, and Livistros and RhodamneP

LANGUAGE AND SUBJECT-MATTER

It is not until the fourteenth century that we find the Greek vernacularaccepted as the natural medium for fictional literature. Although textswhich exploit the vernacular register for specific purposes are found inGreek in the twelfth century, it is not until the fourteenth that literatureof entertainment regularly uses this medium; and from then on italmost always does so. For this 'breakthrough of the vernacular' theWestern example must surely have served as at least a catalyst.

But it is not merely in the choice of a new written register that Greek

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writers of fiction seem to follow or to allude to practice in the West.The ancient romances, even the more rhetorically elaborate ones byAchilles Tatios and Heliodoros, had been crowded with narrativedetail, often of a fairly spectacular sort. In the twelfth century a greaterfastidiousness, and a correspondingly greater interest in form and inthe text itself as rhetoric, led to a dilution of the 'action-packed' formulaand to a concomitant focus on the main characters as human beingsacted upon rather than acting. This interiorization of the action of theromance was taken to its furthest extreme in the twelfth century byEustathios Makremvolites. The later romances however are onceagain packed with incident, and in Kallimachos, Velthandros, andLivistros prominence is given to incidents of a kind scarcely encounteredbefore in the Greek romance.

The ancient romances certainly do permit miraculous escapes, andmagic makes a brief appearance in a minor episode of necromancy inthe Aithiopika of Heliodoros. But by and large the attitude of theancient writers to magic is a rationalist one: the special effects inAchilles Tatios' romance are carefully explained away; and Kalasiris inthe Aithiopika is not above faking magical effects. The Hellenisticwriters made the most of their opportunities to strain their readers'credulity, but for all that their imaginative world was firmly anchored toa real geography and a romanticized history. A partial exception maybe made for the Hellenistic Alexander 'romance', which even in itsearly form contained its share of marvels, and seems to have beencontinuously read and copied throughout the Byzantine period.14

The 'new' element is most obvious in Kallimachos, where it has alsobeen most discussed.15 'Folktale' motifs suddenly appear: a task is laidbefore three brothers to determine which will inherit a kingdom; amagic ring is given to the hero by his brothers; the lovers meet in thecastle of an ogre, described with a wealth of supernatural detail; theogre himself has held a kingdom to ransom and devoured all theheroine's relatives to gain possession of the beautiful Chrysorrhoe;finally there is a magic apple that can cause and revoke the appearanceof death. It is probably fruitless to speculate about the precise sourcesof these elements. Some, particularly the dragon-slaying story, arelikely to have come from the Greek oral tradition, in which thatparticular story is still current both in songs and in tales.16 Others, suchas the magic ring and apple, are more widely diffused in the narra-tive literature of the West and also of the Islamic East. What isincontrovertible, however, is that very similar lands of narrativeincident crowd the pages of Arthurian romance, from Chrétien andMarie de France onwards. There, too, scholarly attention has for sometime been directed away from open-ended speculation about the Celtic

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folklore from which these elements must have been drawn, to theliterary use made of them by writers of romance.17 It need not becoincidence that Greek writers began to turn towards the world ofmagic and folklore at the same time as they also began to recognize theequation, already fully established in the West, between fiction and thevernacular. It is also entirely typical of the covert allusiveness of whichByzantine writers were often capable, that no single element ofWestern folklore was directly incorporated into a Greek romance. Itwas only the concept of drawing on this kind of resource that was takenover by the Greek writers.

Although the 'folkloric' element is much more intrusive in Kalli-machos than in the other Greek romances, the new relaxation of thesomewhat rigorous and literal standards of realism which obtained inthe twelfth century is also exploited to considerable effect in the twoother romances under consideration, Velthandros and Livistros. In theformer the shift from the hero's wanderings through an identifiably realAnatolia, to his quest for the source of the mysterious river of water andfire in the Castle of Love, is managed by a gradual and at firstimperceptible transition. It is also striking that the arrival of Erosthe King at the castle and the beauty contest which follows arenot presented, as are the corresponding elements in other Greekromances, as taking place in a dream but as part of the real experienceof the hero. On the same level, in Velthandros, after the return to thereal world which follows his initiation in the Castle of Eros, isthe striking dramatic moment where, in defiance of literal realism,Chrysantza recognizes the hero, whom in the real world she has nevermet before.

In Livistros and Rhodamne the world in which the action takes placeis more literally presented, in obedience to the model of Makrem-volites' romance in the twelfth century, which is here followed quiteclosely. But even here there is an element of imaginative wonderland inthe presentation of Rhodamne's allegorically triangular castle, and inthe magical means by which she is abducted and later restored to thehero. Once again there is no single element which could plausibly beidentified as 'Arthurian' or even as specifically Western. But these areall elements of a kind intimately associated with the Western romancefrom the twelfth century onwards, and have no real equivalent in theolder Greek tradition.

STRUCTURAL PARALLELS

A similar process of innovative assimilation can be detected in thestructure of the original Greek romances. All three of the texts under

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discussion share a common plot structure, according to which a herosets out in search of adventures, falls in love which is consummated halfway through the romance, then is separated from his bride and has to gothrough further trials to win her again permanently. Precisely thisstructure had been used in two of the influential French romances ofChrétien de Troyes. In Eric et Etude and in Yvain the marriage of thehero and his bride takes place less than half way through the text, but ittakes many more adventures before the hero reaches the spiritualmaturity to live happily with his lady.18 In the first case the hero's excessof uxoriousness leads to a rift which takes many adventures to heal; inthe second the hero is parted from his wife against his will but thenbecomes so engrossed in the life of adventure as to forget to return afterthe promised interval of a year.

There are no compelling thematic similarities between theseromances of Chrétien and the vernacular Greek poems. But thesimilarity of structure is unmistakable, and assumes much greaterimportance when these two romances are set alongside the rest ofChretien's oeuvre and indeed of early vernacular literature in WesternEurope generally. Eric et Enide and Yvain apply to the romance aparticular form of bipartite structure that has been noted in suchdiverse medieval poems as Beowulf, the Chanson de Roland, and thetwelfth-century French romans d'antiquité, as well as in the vernacularFrench Vie de St Alexis, the Chanson de Guillaume and the Nibelungen-lied}9 The defining characteristic of this structure is the buildingof a story out of two halves which are formally symmetrical andthematically complementary rather than causally linked according toAristotelian principles.

In the Greek romances we are faced with a very specific form ofbipartite structure, that of love found and consummated in the firsthalf, then tested and finally validated by a new series of adventuresresulting in permanent reunion. All the thematic elements that go tomake up this structure had already been present in the Greek romancesof Hellenistic times and again of the twelfth century, but in none ofthese are the themes set out with the formal symmetry of Eric et Enide,Yvain, or the fourteenth-century Greek romances.

It may be suggested that this structural organization, common tothese three later Greek romances, affords the most effective vehicle forthe essential theme of all the Greek romances, from Hellenistic timesonwards. The quest for love and permanence through a series ofreversals of fortune, becomes enshrined in the formal arrangement ofthe text itself. This innovation, which leads to the most formally perfectdevelopment of the Greek tradition of the romance, is not fortuitous,nor is it purely the invention of the fourteenth-century Greek writers.

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Rather, they must have recognized in the romances of Chrétien or inothers deriving from them a possibility of structural organization thatwould enable them to give an entirely new artistic expression to a set ofthemes inherited from their own tradition.

PROPER NAMES AND FICTIONAL GEOGRAPHY

The same attempt at conscious integration of Western elements canalso be seen at work in the names given to the principal characters in twoof the three romances under consideration, Velihandros and Livistros.The tendency for the protagonists to have names which are semantic-ally suggestive of the ideal qualities of their bearers goes back to theearliest known Greek romance, Chaíreos and Kallirrhoe by Chariton ofAphrodisias: the hero's name suggests joy and greeting; the heroine'smeans literally 'flowing with beauty'; and this convention had largelybeen maintained in the romances of the twelfth century. But, inaddition, the twelfth-century authors had used proper names as a wayof affirming the generic affiliations of their romances with those of theirpredecessors.

This kind of homage to tradition is also carried over into thefourteenth-century romances. The names of Kallimachos and Chry-sorrhoe have been derived by splitting the name of Chariton's first-century CE heroine, Kallirrhoe, to give the first component to the heroand the second to the heroine. In the case of the proper names inVelihandros and in Livistros, the same process is still at work but here,as has often been noticed, with a difference. If the second component ofVelihandros' name is orthodox enough, on the model of Thersandros(from Achilles Tatios' romance) and Aristandros (from the frag-mentary romance of Manassis written in the twelfth century), its firstcomponent has an unmistakably foreign ring. The same must be said ofthe second components of the names Chrysantza and Phaidrokazain the same romance, and doubts have been raised even aboutRodophilos, the name of the hero's father.20 Stranger still is the case ofLivistros, in Livistros and Rhodamne, who comes from the land ofLivandros, and is described as of Latin race, whose rival is a black kingof Egypt called Verderichos, presumably Frederick, in a world other-wise peopled by such traditionally named characters as Klitovos/Klitovon, Rhodamne, and Myrtane.21

In the case of Velihandros, the name of the hero's father provides theprincipal clue. Rodophilos has reasonably enough been taken to be asuperficial Hellenization of Rodolfo/Rudolphe. So it may well be, butthe important thing is that as well as sounding Western, it hasthe appearance in Greek of such traditional names as Rhodope,

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Rhodanthe, and such endings as -machos, -sthenes, -andros. 'Rodo-philos' points to tradition in the same way that the names in the twelfth-century romances and Kallimachos had done, but here two traditionsare woven into one.

The same has happened in the case of the hero. Velthandros has beeningeniously identified as Bertrand, but this is by no means the wholestory. The second component of his name is entirely traditional inGreek, and even its foreign-sounding first component alludes to theGreek root velt-, as in veltion (beltion), the comparative degree of theadjective 'good' in the learned language. Such a name would be entirelyappropriate for a hero named after the example of Manassis' Arist-andros (where arist- is the root of the superlative degree of thesame adjective). The conflation of traditional Greek roots (yelt- and-andros) which at the same time seems to transliterate a Western name(Bertrand, et cetera) exemplifies the same process of double allusion aswas discernible in the case of Rodophilos.

Of the names in Livistros, that of Klitovos, the first-person narrator,declares an obvious affinity with his counterpart in Achilles Tatios'romance, Kleitophon. The names of the girls, Rhodamne and Myrtane,belong more or less with such names as Rhodanthe in the twelfth-century romance by Theodoras Pródromos, Rhodanthe and Dosik-les,22 and Myrtale in Daphnis and Chloe. However, the increasedproportion of names linked with flowers may also have something to dowith the influence of Western romances such as the Roman de la Roseand Fleur et Blanchefleur. The real puzzle here is presented by the nameof the hero himself. One would expect Livandros rather than Livistros,to be the name of a person, but the similarity of these names makes itclear that Livistros is to be thought of as named after a country.Although the hero is twice said to be 'of Latin race', there are goodreasons to seek this country in the East rather than in the West.

Firstly, although the geography of the poem is extremely vague andmakes no pretensions to realism, two real places are mentionedunambiguously: Egypt, to which Rhodamne is abducted, andArmenia, of which the fictional province of Litavia is Klitovos' home.Add to this the fact that when Livistros and Klitovos cross the sea toEgypt on magic horses it is possible to see from one shore to the other,and that this crossing is at one point called a ford {poros), and we seemto have a conscious inversion of the Biblical crossing of the Red Sea. Itcan hardly be the Mediterranean that separates the lovers in this case. Ifthe country from which Livistros comes is ruled by 'Latins' and can bereached from Egypt by way of the Red Sea; if, moreover, somewhereon his wanderings in search of Rhodamne the hero encounters anArmenian prince, Klitovos, the conclusion that Livistros' homeland is

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envisaged as being on the eastern side of the Mediterranean becomesinescapable. Crusader Lebanon (the Greek name Libanos/Livanoshad been in use since Roman times) offers two attractions for anauthor intent on the same kind of synthesis of Western and traditionalelements as we detected in the name of Velthandros: allusion to acrusader state allows him, in suitably veiled form, to express hisadmiration for Westerners and by implication for their literature; italso allows an even subtler pointer to his ultimate Greek model inLeukippe and Kleitophon by Achilles Tatios. That romance had begunwith praise for the city of Tyre, which later was included, with much ofLebanon, in the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem.

CONCLUSION

I have not attempted a full survey of the vexed and complex question ofthe relation between the Eastern and Western romances in the four-teenth century. Instead, I have confined myself, after a brief introduc-tion to the problem, to proposing new solutions which, if accepted, willconsiderably fill out the picture of subtle and selective assimilation ofWestern vernacular literature by Greek writers in the fourteenthcentury. At a general level, the gradual acceptance in the West of thevernacular as the appropriate medium for fiction, essential to thelater development of modern literature as we understand the termtoday, seems to have impressed itself upon the Byzantines, after thereluctance of the twelfth century and the hiatus of the thirteenth(from which no vernacular or secular writing survives). The world ofadventure, and the relaxation of the inflexible law of chastity betweenthe hero and heroine that had been a generic convention of allthe earlier Greek romances, and in particular the entirely new roleassigned to the supernatural, are all thematic components that mayplausibly be derived from the West. But once again derivation is farfrom being passive 'following': it is a type of story, or of thematicelement, which the Byzantine writers seem to have admired in the workof their Western counterparts.and grafted on to their own tradition.Similarly the structural organization of the three Constantinopolitanromances examined above, in which for the first time in Greekthe 'bipartite' structure of much Western medieval literature is con-sistently adopted, takes something from the West in order to giveexpression to a view of love and fate which is purely Hellenistic andByzantine. And the clues provided by the proper names in two of theromances suggest that Byzantine writers of romance acknowledged thepart played by the crusader states in the East, in transmitting a

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vitalizing, but to the Byzantines always subordinate, element from thecourtly romances of the West.

NOTES

1. Quo enim Arturi Britonis nomen fama volans non pertulit et vulgavit: quousqueChristianum pertingit imperium? Quis, inquam, Arturum Britonem non loquatur,cum pene notior habeatur Asiatics gentibus quam Britannis; sicut nobis referuntPalmigeri nostri de orientis partibus redeuntes? Loquuntur ilium orientales,loquuntur occidui, toto terrarum orbe divisi. Loquitur ilium Aegyptus; Bosforusexclusa non tacet. . . . Celebrat actus ejus Antiochia, Armenia, Palaestina. (R.S.Loomis, 'The Modena Sculpture and Arthurian Romance', Studi medievali, NS, 9[1936], 10.)

2. For text and discussion, see P. Breillat, 'La Table Ronde en Orient. Le Poeme grecdu Vieux Chevalier', Mélanges d'archéologie et d'histoire, 55 (1938), 308-40. For anew interpretation of this text see F. Rizzo Nervo, 'Il "Mondo dei Padri" nellaMetafora del Vecchio Cavaliere', Quaderni del Siculorum Gymnasium (Universityof Catania), 15 (1985), 115-28.

3. For a fuller discussion of these texts and bibliography, see R. Beaton, The MedievalGreek Romance (Cambridge, 1989), pp.132-42.

4. See G. Spadaro, Contributo sulle fonti del Romanzo greco-medievale 'Florio ePlaziaflora' (Athens, 1966), p.14.

5. See E. Follieri, 'La versione greca volgare del Teseida del Boccaccio', Rivista distudi bizantini e neoellenici, 7 (1953), 67-77.

6. M. Pelaez, 'Un frammento del romanzo francese in prosa di Tristano', Studimedievale, NS, 2 (1929), 198-204.

7. M. and E. Jeffreys, 'Imberios and Margarona: The Manuscripts, Sources andEdition of a Byzantine Verse Romance', Byzantion, 41 (1971), 127.

8. See, for example, K. Setton, 'The Byzantine Background to the Italian Renais-sance', Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 100 (1956), 38-40; andJ. Irmscher, 'Les Francs - représentants de la littérature en Grec vulgaire',Byzantinische Forschungen, 7 (1979), 57-66.

9. For an up-to-date review of the evidence for dating these romances, see Beaton,The Medieval Greek Romance, pp.101-2, 190, 196.

10. Ibid., pp.143-59.11. C. Cupane, '"Eros-Basileus": la Figura di Eros nel romanzo Bizantino d'Amore',

Atti del Accademia di Arti di Palermo, Ser. 4, 33 (1974), 243-97; 'Il Motivo delcastello nella narrativa tardo-bizantina. Evoluzione di un' allegoria', Jahrbuch derösterreichischen Byzantinistik, 27 (1978), 229-67.

12. See in particular H.R. Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (Brighton andMinnesota, 1982), and R. Holub, Reception Theory (London, 1985).

13. M. Pichard (ed.), Le roman de Callimaque et de Chrysorrhoé (Paris, 1956) (withfacing French translation); E. Kriaras (ed.), 'Velthandros and Chrysantza' in id.,Vizandina Ippotika Mythistorimata (Athens, 1955), pp.87-130; J.A. Lambert(ed.). Le roman de Libistros et Rhodamné (Amsterdam, 1935) (with Frenchintroduction and summary).

14. I am grateful to Dr. D.W. Holton for drawing my attention to specific correspon-dence between episodes of Velthandros and of Livistros, and the later Byzantineversions of the Alexander 'romance'. However in view of the late date of theseversions (from the late fourteenth century onwards), and of the apparent influenceof the romances on some of these texts, I am inclined to see the romances as beingthe source of all these elements in the later Alexander story.

15. See G. Megas, 'Kallimachou ke Chrysorrois Ypothesis', in Mélanges Merlier, Vol. 2(Athens, 1956), pp.147-72; and I. Diller, 'Märchenmotive in Kallimachos und

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Chrysorrhoe', Folia neohellenica, 2 (1977), 25-40.16. See M. Alexiadis, I Ellmikes Parallayes yia ton Drakontoktono Iroa: Paramy-

tholayiki Meleti (Ioannina, 1982).17. See, for example, the essays in D. Bethurum (ed.), Critical Approaches to Medieval

Literature (London, 1960).18. Cf. J. Stevens, Medieval Romance: Themes and Approaches (London, 1973),

pp.73-5.19. See W. Ryding, Structure in Medieval Narrative (The Hague and Paris, 1971),

pp.39-43; 118-24; 124-5.20. For a summary of discussions and bibliography, see Kriaras (ed.), Vizandina

Ippolika Mythistorimala, pp.97-8.21. Cf. Lambert (ed.), Libistros et Rhodamné, pp.45-8.22. An etymology for the name of the heroine in this romance is proposed by E. Kriaras,

'To onoma "Rhodamne"', Ellinika (Thessalonika), 22 (1969), 436-40.

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