Public religious ritual and private devotional practice together occasioned much of the production of Byzantine poetry.
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This includes not only hymns, an integral part of the liturgy since Late Antiquity, but also versified texts with a specific liturgical function (synaxaria, calendars, metrical prefaces), metrical hagiography, epigrams (inscribed on church buildings, icons, religious objects, books), or poems with a more personal character, such as versified prayers, catanyctic poems (i.e., poems of contrition) and self-addressed poems (eis heauton). These texts often have much in common, well beyond their metrical form: from their contexts of performance and reception to the themes, literary motifs, and rhetorical devices they contain. It was not uncommon for a single author to write in a variety of the aforementioned genres; and yet these texts are rarely studied together (not least due to the specialized nature of the expertise of individual scholars). Later Byzantium offers us a particularly rich spectrum of sacred poetry, which has only recently started to arouse significant interest. While most of its poetic genres have a long history in Byzantine literature, their metamorphoses in this period connected to changes in socio-political, cultural and religious conditions deserve closer study. It is the purpose of this volume to propose a broader scholarly approach to the aesthetics of Byzantine poetry, taking into consideration the contexts of religious practice and devotion from c. the 11th to the 15th centuries.
