International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

LITERATURE IN THE AGE OF THE KOMNENOI
Chairs:
 Elisabeth Jeffreys, Nikolaos Zagklas
Varvara Zharkaya
, 
Lexical Innovations and Literary Networks in the 12
th
Century Byzantium
Luisa Andriollo
, 
Le roy est mort, vive le roy: Imperial Succession and Imperial Legitimacy 
in Kallikles’ Funerary Poems for Alexios I and John II Komnenoi
Dmitri Chernoglazov
, 
Whether Theodoros Prodromos Invented the Russel Paradox?
Katarzyna Warcaba
, 
A Transtextual Analysis of the ‘Katomyomachia’
Ranko Kozić
, 
Il concetto pittorico e il drammatico nel romanzo del Macrembolita
Dušan Popović
, 
Drosilla and Charicles
: 
An Instance of the Ambivalent Conception of Literary Emulation in Middle Byzantine Context
Alexey Kryukov
, 
Byzantine Homilies of the Comnenian Time: Atticism and Asianism

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Varvara Zharkaya 
National Research University, Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia; 
[e-mail]
Lexical Innovations and Literary Networks in the 12
th
Century Byzantium
The paper focuses on the language of the 12
th
century Byzantine poetry. As we know, the 
Comnenian period witnessed an unprecedented blossoming of daring experiments covering, among 
other literary layers, the lexical level of the texts produced by learned poets of the epoch. In a search 
for new form of poetic expression, they introduced vernacular elements into high-brow poetry and 
coined new words, some of which were adopted by the subsequent poetic tradition, whereas others 
remained hapax legomena. These innovations were possible due to a deliberate giving up of the 
Ancient system of versification and purposeful simplification of the syntax.
In addition to the words deriving from the informal register and consciously created 
neologisms, the lexicon of the 12
th
century poetry includes items adopted from the scholarly 
philological tradition. Obsolete words, with scanty occurrences even in Ancient sources, retrieved, 
explained, and commented upon by commentators and scholiasts — often themselves poets as well 
(e.g. John Tzetzes) — penetrated into the poetry of the epoch. A typical pattern can be observed: a 
given lexeme has 1 occurrence for Antiquity, 1 occurrence for the 12
th
century scholarly sources, and 
several occurrences for poetry of the same epoch (Constantine Manasses, Theodore Prodromos) 
and then virtually disappears. 
The nascent poetic language influenced the language of the learned prose too. Neologisms and 
previously forgotten words created or actualized within the poetic experiments were taken over by, 
e.g., Michael Choniates in the Epistles.
The paper presents a few case-studies of lexical interplay between the 12
th
century Byzantine texts 
and questions the possibility of tracing otherwise unattested networks of learning and literary circles.