@phdthesis{8708976,
  abstract     = {{Byzantine books are not inert containers of classical and medieval Greek texts. They are historically situated artefacts with a story to tell. Part of this story is written in the margins of the manuscripts, in what modern scholars would call their paratexts and more traditional medievalists their marginalia. Some of these marginal texts, remarkably, were composed in verse. Verse form, I argue, invites us to read and study these texts as literature in their own right, and not just as accessory or subordinate by-products of Byzantine book culture. 
The paratexts in verse in Greek medieval manuscripts are known as “book epigrams”, because epigrams are poems designed to be inscribed in or on a given object (in our case, the book itself). This dissertation puts together for the first time a number of poems that fall under the same category of book epigrams, namely “verse scholia”. Scholia is the conventional name given to marginal commentaries running along the sections of text at issue. Accordingly, verse scholia are book epigrams found in the external margins of the page next to the passages on which they comment.
In particular, the corpus of this dissertation is constituted by Byzantine verse scholia on historiographical works. Part 1 is devoted to verse scholia on Herodotus and other ancient historians. In Chapter 1, I give an outline and new evidence of the work on Herodotus by a well-known Byzantine author, John Tzetzes. In Chapter 2, I present a new cycle of verse scholia on Herodotus from a number of manuscripts. Part 2 focuses on the scholia in verse to a Byzantine historian, Niketas Choniates. In Chapter 3, I present a new cycle of verse scholia on Niketas Choniates by Ephraim of Ainos. In Chapter 4, I offer a poem-by-poem commentary of this new cycle. 
In Part 1, the Byzantine attitudes towards the Classical tradition reveal the ways in which a Christian society welcomed (or not) an essentially pagan element of its cultural heritage. In Part 2, we see how readers used the margins of manuscripts to (re)write a more recent past. In both parts, I investigate the contexts and methods of composition of the poems. These more or less spontaneous marginal interventions, in fact, follow specific intellectual programmes and ideological agendas. 
Chapters 2 and 3 are the core of this dissertation. They offer the first editions of two cycles of epigrams, preceded by the descriptions of the respective manuscripts and their relationships with one another. The poems are edited using well-known methods of textual criticism combined with the newest trends in philology. This approach seeks to account for the material reality of the manuscripts and to reproduce more faithfully some typically medieval textual features, such as orthography, accentuation and punctuation.}},
  author       = {{Bértola, Julián}},
  keywords     = {{Book epigrams,scholia,marginalia,paratexts,Byzantine poetry,Byzantine literature,Byzantine manuscripts,manuscript studies,textual criticism,philology,reception,Herodotus,Thucydides,Diodorus Siculus,Niketas Choniates,Ephraim of Ainos,John Tzetzes}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  pages        = {{xvii, 246}},
  publisher    = {{Universiteit Gent. Faculteit Letteren en Wijsbegeerte}},
  school       = {{Ghent University}},
  title        = {{Using poetry to read the past : unedited Byzantine verse scholia on historians in the margins of medieval manuscripts}},
  year         = {{2021}},
}