International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

Hisatsugu Kusabu
Osaka City University, Osaka, Japan; 
[e-mail]
Byzantine Editors and Publishers: Texts, Works, and Reading
Literature in Byzantine heresiology was compiled as a sort of theological florilegium (anthology) 
that involved multiple methods of text editing. Byzantine heresiologists and their readers were 
primarily editors of texts written by other authors. Readers also often offered comments in the 
margins of folios. This has been regarded as the typical form of premodern manuscript editing, 
and has been criticized in modern times for its lack of authorial originality or innovation. This 
paper argues that the practices of Byzantine text editors and publishers were precursors to those to 

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which we are accustomed in contemporary digital editing. It focuses on manuscript editing and the 
publication of a twelfth-century (CE) text on heresiology. 
In his Dogmatike Panoplia (ca. 1115), Euthymios Zigabenos compiled fragments of texts 
“copied-and-pasted” from the works of various Church fathers. Most of the Panoplia chapters have 
been evaluated thusly. One exception is a chapter composed by Zigabenos, which was popular for 
its detailed descriptions of contemporary Byzantine Bogomils in Constantinople. It would not be 
accurate, however, to overly emphasize the Zigabenian “authorship” of the Bogomils chapter. This 
paper argues that the editing style and author-/editorship of the Panoplia do not represent a typical 
premodern example, but rather are more similar to collective editorial practices in our postmodern 
digital age, with our digital databases and e-dictionaries such Wikipedia. 
Apart from heresiology, in other literary genres, publication databases were used as sources 
from which editors “copied-and-pasted” selected text fragments. Popular examples include the 
lexicography of the Suda and the Zonaras’ Lexicon and, among legal collections in jurisprudence, the 
Basilicorum Libri and the Constantinian Excerpta. Features of our contemporary editing systems 
such as the existence of databases, the entry of keywords for reference, and the collection of text 
fragments were all critical components of the Byzantine publication process as well. Thus, it is not 
only the process of manuscript duplication but also remarkable text editing that must be considered 
in comparison to our digital editing era.
This paper will situate the Dogmatike Panoplia in the context of this rich Byzantine publishing 
history and in comparison to the contemporary moment of digital publishing. Byzantine authors 
and manuscript scribes functioned as both editors and publishers, taking advantage of imperial, 
institutional, and personal libraries with their rich codification techniques. The circulation of 
manuscripts in which they were involved activated book-market networks in the East Mediterranean, 
Western European, and Northwest Eurasian areas.