This article challenges the widespread belief that Byzantine authors of the Dark Ages showed no interest in anthropological speculation. It focuses on patriarch Methodios of Constantinople († 847) who developed a highly original exegesis of Late Antique hagiographical texts, which he presented in the form of authorial comments in his paraphrases of these texts. His Encomium of St Agatha, which is based on the Passio of the saint, reveals a keen interest in the significance of gender and gender-related roles within the Christian belief system. Analysis of select passages shows that Methodios no longer subscribed to the widely held Late Antique belief that human perfection necessitated the dissociation from gender and gender-related roles, and that he therefore radically redefined such dissociation as an intermediary stage leading towards the sanctification of such urges through a redirection towards Christ.

In the Madrid Skylitzes manuscript (BN, Vitr. 26–2) representations of Orthodox triumph over iconoclast heresy range from startlingly novel to seemingly incoherent. While previous studies have posited that the visual programme of the chronicle originates in Comnenian Constantinople, this article argues that the visual narrative is out of place in a climate of rigorous Comnenian Orthodoxy. The visual narrative actively restructures and revisions Byzantine history: iconoclast arch-villains such as John the Grammarian are assigned symbols of sanctity, Orthodox heroes such as patriarch Methodios and empress Theodora are obscured and misrepresented, and important events in the chronicle are turned into visual voids.

Constantine Manasses’ Synopsis Chronike is a twelfth-century verse chronicle, recasting Byzantine history in a specifically Comnenian, romantic and poetic vein. The chronicle has been preserved in many manuscripts, but it has also come down to us in a number of different collections of excerpts. This article wishes to draw attention to the readers! excerptors of the Synopsis Chronike, to consider the use and usefulness of the text in relation to the composition itself. Some collections of excerpts are compared and discussed, with special focus on the excerpts included in a fifteenth-century miscellaneous manuscript (Codex Upsaliensis Graecus 8).

This article examines how two prominent Greek critics of the period 1880–1930 — Palamas and Xenopoulos — perceived the generic character and the narrative demands of the modern Greek short story (διήγημα). It explores the degree that two cardinal aspects in the theory of the genre — the relation of the short story with the novel and the division into two separate short-story traditions — influenced both critics in their definition of the διήγημα and in their evaluation of the work of specific short story writers. The contrast and comparison of Palamas’ and Xenopoulos’ views pinpoints the standards, contradictions and restrictions that formed the critical perspectives on the διήγημα and thus highlights its neglected critical history during the period 1880–1930, which coincided with its prevalence in mainstream Greek prose fiction.

In this article, Kazantzakis’ popularity over the years is briefly reviewed and it is argued that the two dominant approaches to his work, which could be described as ethnographic and philosophical-theological, respectively, correspond to the antithesis between being and becoming. The question addressed here is whether we can read his fiction in a new way, and pass from the ontology of being to the contingency of becoming, following the example of the process theologians who brought him closer to postmodernism.

In the first half of the fifteenth century a man donated an icon to the monastery of Mega Spelaion at Kalavryta; his name was less an instrument of identification than a manifesto of social association: John Tornikes Doukas Angelos Palaiologos Raoul Laskaris Philanthropenos Asanes. To judge from the chain of such resounding names of the leading late Byzantine families he clearly belonged to the dominant class of his time, and since nothing else is known of him, for lack of more precise social coordinates, we surely must count him among the aristocracy. Can we take an educated guess at what constituted a person of such social standing? He must have owned land; he probably held some office, while the accumulation of all his names points to marriage alliances between families of similar social standing. None of these assumptions suggests anything new about the aristocracy of the Palaiologan period, and yet, the overview that will follow aims to disclose exactly that: the points in which this era brought forth new developments that challenge the (thankfully dwindling) misconception of Byzantium as a state in which hardly anything changed. In 1973 Angeliki Laiou published her important article on the Palaiologan aristocracy. In twenty dense pages she made a number of remarks and reached several important conclusions that have influenced the direction of scholarship on the topic. As such it is worth summarizing these conclusions briefly.