Vessela Valiavitcharska

In progress.

[Volume in progress.]

Forthcoming with the University of Alabama Press, 2022.

Examines the role of Byzantine punctuation in intertwining poetic performance with the rhythms of performed oratory and other prose discourse.

Argues that Byzantine accounts of the power and responsibility of language of the ninth- to eleventh-century attributed tremendous gravity to the role of the spoken word (logos prophorikos), regarding it as an active participant in the object of speaking.

At the end of the iconoclastic era, we find two distinct approaches to rhetorical argumentation in the commentaries on Hermogenes’ On Stases. They indicate a high level of learning and suggest there was no radical break in the continuity of rhetorical education during the so-called Byzantine “dark age.”

The chapter argues for a correlation between rhetoric and dialectic in middle Byzantine rhetorical theory motivated by a serious engagement with argumentation; it also suggests that the intellectual climate of the Iconoclastic controversy propelled the selection and transmission of rhetorical theory in the period between the late eighth and the end of the tenth centuries.

Ancient accounts describe emotion as a dynamic movement of the soul. Relying on Aristotle’s definition of movement, this chapter explores the relationship between movements of soul and verbal discourse in rhetorical treatises.

A survey of the Byzantine tradition of tropes and figures, with a discussion of trope and figure function and an appendix of frequently references and used figures (with illustrations).

Browse the handbook.

Based on material from Byzantine and Old Church Slavonic homilies and from Byzantine rhetorical commentaries, the book redefines and expands our understanding of both Byzantine and Old Church Slavonic prose rhythm. It positions rhetorical rhythm at the intersection of prose and poetry and explores its role in argumentation and persuasion, suggesting that rhetorical rhythm can carry across linguistic boundaries, and in general aims to demonstrate the stylistic and argumentative importance of rhythm in rhetorical practice. Along the way, it challenges the entrenched separation between content and style and emphasizes the role of rhythm as a tool of invention and a means of creating shared emotional experience.

Drawing on a long tradition of teaching rhetoric that extends back to the late antique and even Hellenistic periods, the Byzantine rhetorical commentaries offer a unique witness to a “syncretic” pedagogy. This article examines the Byzantine commentaries on four figures from the Hermogenic corpus, the standard “textbook” used in rhetorical education in Byzantium. Somewhat “untraditional,” these figures—known as period, pneuma, akmê, and antitheton—are assumed to have significant value in the invention and arrangement of arguments.

Beweise aus den scholia vetera und scholia recentiora bezeugen, daß rhetorische Ausbildung in den Händen der Grammatiker in Byzanz schon früh begann. Sie explizierten die klassischen Texte anhand von Begriffen aus den Progymnasmata und führten rhetorischen Analysen der Texte durch. Die Terminologie in den scholia ist nicht ganz in Einklang mit der die man in ‘mainstream’, auf Hermogenes gegründete Rhetoriklehrbücher findet, und kann aus älteren, vielleicht peripatetischen, Quellen entlehnt sein. Doch der Konflikt der Begriffe war nicht eine Quelle des Unbehagens für den byzantinischen Lehrer, sondern ein Instrument zum flexiblen Denken.

Gorgias' insistence on correctness of speech surfaces not only in the Encomium of Helen, but also in the Funeral Oration fragment and in Agathon's parody of Gorgianic rhetoric in Plato's Symposium. Correct speech goes beyond the effectiveness of language and into the domain of ethical correctness and responsibility.