This book takes a fresh approach to the study of Byzantine historiography by focusing on an oft-neglected feature of the texts: the authors’ preface(s). Though she is not the first to discuss historiographical prefaces, of course, Kiapidou is the first author since Heinrich Lieberich in 1900 to produce a dedicated, holistic study on the subject. With a background in Classical and Byzantine philology and a specialisation in the field of historiography, she is well-placed to undertake the project. As she explains in a brief Foreword (11-13), she began with two main goals: “to outline the details of the prefatory function of the Byzantine historiographical proems as microtexts” and “to detect and evaluate the theoretical views expressed by the authors of each period as far as the genre of Byzantine historiography is concerned” (12). To this end, she conducts a detailed study of the forty-four surviving works of history from the Byzantine empire that contain authors’ prefaces, spanning over a thousand years from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries.
The book begins with a substantial introductory chapter (17-59) in which Kiapidou lays out the theoretical and historical background to her study. Besides being rather dated now, Lieberich’s Studien zu den Proömien in der griechischen und byzantinischen Geschichtschreibung was mainly concerned withQuellenforschung—identifying the Byzantine authors’ Classical sources. By contrast, Kiapidou’s goal is to provide a literary analysis of the prefaces on their own terms. To this end, she draws on the French literary theorist Gérard Genette’s theory of paratexts, examining them as a genre of “microtexts”—a “preface genre” (30)—that set out the authors’ purposes and methods. The second part of the introduction (33-59) provides a succinct overview of the main historiographical prefaces from Classical Antiquity, ranging from Herodotus to Herodian, to establish the foundational models and ideas that were available to Byzantine authors.
The remainder of the book consists of three chapters of uneven length: two substantial chapters of analysis and one brief chapter of conclusions. Given the vast quantity and chronological range of source material, creating a coherent structure for this book must have been no easy task. Kiapidou adopts an interesting combination of thematic and narrative approaches. Chapter One, “The Prefatory Communication Situation in Byzantine Historiography” (61-122), breaks down the typology and principles of the prefaces, making particular note of twelve texts with “special generic features” (metrical, epistolographic, and rhetorical). In short, while Byzantine historians all drew from the same body of ancient models, their prefaces are surprisingly varied in content and style. Some are written in poetic meter, while others take the form of letters or addresses to dedicatees. Some even have more than one preface: in a few cases, a second preface appears either immediately after the first or deep within the main text itself. Kiapidou rightly emphasizes the individuality of the authors, for whom the writing of a preface did not just reflect “a desire to achieve a successful imitation of older models,” but was also “a vehicle permitting the author to use those models, the tools available to him, the common motifs of the genre and his personal ideas towards a specific purpose of his own” (124).
Chapter Two, “The Content of Preserved Prefaces of Byzantine Historiography” (123-210), then proceeds through the remaining thirty-two prefaces in chronological order, dividing them into two sub-categories of “elaborated prefaces” (125-196) and “conventionally functional prefaces” (197-210). These range from Eusebius of Caesarea in the fourth century to Laonikos Chalkondyles and George Sphrantzes in the fifteenth. In the interests of completeness, there are cross-references at the appropriate junctures in the text to earlier discussions of prefaces in Chapter One, which are not repeated here.
Chapter Three, “Theoretical Aspects of Byzantine Historiography: The Evidence of the Prefaces” (211-229) returns to the book’s original questions and summarizes its key findings. Was there a “blueprint” of the Byzantine history-writer, an ideal type of person who should serve as a historian? No—besides being well-educated men (with the exception of Anna Komnene, a well-educated woman), “there was theoretically no one who, in the right conditions, could not write history, in an age when historiography was not yet a discipline” (213). This is a key point: although the Byzantines certainly recognized history as a literary genre, it was not a profession and there were no definitive rules, simply models for the author to rework as desired.
Can we speak, then, of “a Byzantine ‘theory’ of history-writing” (11)? Not quite. The historians certainly knew that they were writing history and indeed “their theoretical remarks on historiography are fairly frequent” (226). Most mention the importance of seeking truth and the moral-didactic value of reading history, for example. Moreover, they share the general sense that history should be about big, important events that affect a large number of people, supplemented at times with details from the lives of emperors or the authors themselves. However, theoretical remarks are not the same thing as a coherent theory or even a theoretical discourse. Kiapidou makes clear that all authors had their own individual ideas of how to write history; interestingly, she notes that these ideas usually stand in dialogue with those of ancient historians but not with those of other Byzantine historians. We get the impression of the Byzantine historian as a solitary amateur (my words, not Kiapidou’s) responding to the inheritance of Classical Antiquity, rather than as a participant in a larger Byzantine discourse. As if to underline the lack of clear disciplinary definition, Kiapidou closes by observing that the Byzantines do not seem to have shared modern scholars’ desire to distinguish between the genres of history and chronicle.
Kiapidou knows her subject matter well and I did not notice any significant errors. If the book has any weakness, it is that it is perhaps too focused on historiographical prefaces. As she herself underlines, Byzantine historians were quite open to adapting ideas from other genres such as rhetoric, hagiography, and philosophy, which all had prefatory traditions of their own. Furthermore, she argues (119) that the Byzantines may have compiled collections of historical prefaces that authors could have used as models, since similar collections existed for rhetorical prefaces. While we could not expect her to devote the same level of attention to other types of preface as she does to the historical ones, it would be useful to expand this study to include more detail on how the different types of Byzantine prefaces may have influenced one another. Perhaps this would make for a good follow-up project.
This book will primarily be of interest to scholars of Byzantine literature, both prose and verse. Classicists and medievalists will also find it valuable as a point of comparison with the historiographical traditions of their own fields. Though a comprehensive study of forty-four historical prefaces is certainly not light reading, Kiapidou’s writing style is commendably accessible, with a clear prose that is mostly unburdened by the kinds of theoretical jargon that one often finds in literary studies. Moreover, although it is not her first language, her written English is generally quite easy to follow and contains only a few minor errors and infelicities that it would seem churlish for me to highlight here. Kiapidou may not have ultimately succeeded in her goal of discovering a Byzantine theory of history-writing, but she has still revealed a great deal about the Byzantines’ ideas and approaches to the genre.