“Short” narratives are sprinkled throughout virtually every genre of text. Yet, classicists and Byzantine scholars have routinely focused on “long” narratives, such as the various epic poems and ancient prose novels that are practically synonymous with literary studies. The tacit assumption seems to have been that such narratives, in some cases only a few lines, offer little to analyze as their brevity makes them too simplistic to say much about. This open-access volume challenges such assumptions and sheds light on Greek short narratives of the Late Antique/Early Byzantine period. It focuses on a specific type known as the tale, defined here as “a short narrative of oral tradition having divine, human, and animal characters that often encounter marvelous, magical, and miraculous phenomena and objects” (1). The Introduction begins by discussing this general lack of scholarly attention to the tale, and the broader need to distinguish between short and long fiction. As the editors rightly note, short fiction cannot be theorized in the same terms as long fiction.
This lays the groundwork for Part 1, devoted to developing new theoretical approaches to study tales. Chapter 1, by Stavroula Constantinou, offers a particular useful framework that revolves around analyzing three aspects of tales: the storyteller, storyness, and story-effect. Utilizing various examples to illustrate each aspect and how one may consider each of these qualities, Constantinou highlights a range of dimensions within which one may approach tales from the authority of the storyteller to the impact on varying audiences. This tripartite structure is flexible and practical enough to be applied to almost any tale, and so this chapter has an immense amount of applicability for future studies. Chapter 2, from Christian Høgel, turns to paradoxography and hagiography to theorize an approach to the central element of many tales, the thauma. In contrast to many classical uses of this term to denote “wonders” or “marvels,” Høgel examines instances involving “actual transgression of physical/natural laws” (41). He further argues for the thauma tale as a specific type of narrative. The similarities between the use ofthauma tales in these genres are especially intriguing, given what Høgel points out as the differing metaphysical framings between paradoxography and hagiography with former construing the source of the marvelous phenomenon being from nature itself, and, for the latter, it is from God. Chapter 3, by Ingela Nilsson. focuses on how paradoxographical narratives construe unbelievable phenomena as believable. This provides the intriguing conceptualization of paradoxography as, not a genre per se, but as “a conceptual space that can cross genres and encompass several worlds, textual and extra-textual” (64). Nilsson examines three kinds of paradoxographical narratives to consider the varying levels of storyworlds. In doing so, she provides novel insights on how these tales achieve believability through their “worldessness,” essentially the links to the readers’ actual world, rather than, as for longer narratives, sustained plot development.
Part 2, then, focuses on acts of storytelling. Sophia Xenophontos, in Chapter 4, turns to Galen with the aim “to focus specifically on the moral-didactic effect of the ancient tale by looking at its function in the context of practical ethics, a popular philosophical product in the Roman imperial period” (83). While most research approaches Galen as a medical author, Xenophontos utilizes aspects of Constantinou’s framework from Chapter 1 to explore how Galen deploys tales in key passages of his works. She demonstrates that these function as didactic tales, propping up ideas of practical ethics, while also convincingly making the case for Galen as a particularly skilled storyteller. Chapter 5, by Stavroula Constantinou and Andria Andreou, then, considers a specific literary device within tales, that of repetition. This opens with the observation that we, in the modern world, tend to treat repetition as effectively synonymous with boringness, rather than considering the positive effects it may have on storytelling. The authors illustrate several instances wherein various triple repetitions function to uphold the authenticity of storytellers and their sources, serving as another valuable means to reveal the complexity behind such short narratives. Chapter 6, from Nicolò Sassi, concerns tales in the hagiographical traditions of Longinos and Menas as essential case studies to explore cross-cultural transmission along the Incense Route and their role in the “enchantment” of the world. This comparative look at the transmission of miraculous episodes in these hagiographical narratives across several languages (Greek, Coptic, Arabic, and Ethiopic) is put together in an impressively meticulous set of tables (141-146). Sassi convincingly argues that the miracle narratives specifically were far less disposable than any other literary elements in these traditions. Curiously though, this chapter seems to consider the changes between these texts as only a possibility of textual transmission, and seems to pass over the possibility of oral transmission across the east, which does stand out in the context of this volume’s stated focus on oral tales. Nonetheless, these instances of miracles in these texts are put forth, not as mere reflections of contemporary ideas about reality, but as active shapers of such. These essentially offer an inverse to apophaticism and negative theology by positioning the divine as near-at-hand, and thus would have offered one means of enchanting the contemporary world.
The third and final part, concerning tales in collections, opens with Chapter 7 by Julia Doroszewska. This takes aim at another understudied literary device: lists, specifically their effect within pardoxographical and miracle collections. Doroszewska appeals to Umbert Eco’s notion of lists having an “inexpressibility topos,” whereby lists are considered to be only a sampling of a much larger, essentially inexpressible, series. In paradoxographical collections, this functions to create the image of an incalculable number of extraordinary occurrences, which are usually only threaded together by a series of conjunctions. Elements of such a theme are, then, illustrated in similar ways within texts like the Miracles of Thekla, with that Saint’s innumerable miracles seeming to confer the impression of the much larger reality of an omnipotent divinity working behind her.Chapter 8, the second (not counting the Introduction) by Stavroula Constantinou and Andria Andreou, then, formulates a classification system of tales. This comprises three categories of tales: the (auto)biographical tale, the marvelous tale, and the supernatural tale, which are further combined with three difference structural forms: the single-episode tale, the multiple-episode tale, and the frame tale. In contrast to the framework of Constantinou in Chapter 1, this classification seems more unwieldy, and, though these terms are intuitive enough to grasp, it is easy to get lost in the flurry of terminology. But the important takeaway here is that this system of categorization also further illustrates that short narratives were themselves often made up of a complex series of parts. This is particularly well demonstrated by the lengthy frame tale from the History of Monks in Egyptdiscussed at the end of the chapter (212-217). That is certainly still a short narrative, though it is one that comprises several tales, and harbors elements from nearly every aspect of this classification system. The ninth and final chapter, by Markéta Kulhánková, focuses on the construction of space in edifying tales, specifically those of the understudied collection of Anastasios Sinaites. One central idea brought forth is Foucault’s notion of “heterotopia,” supplemented here by Myrto Veikou’s work of considering in-between spaces as being on a continuum between the human and divine in Byzantine literature. This quality is expressed, for instance, in the first seven tales from Anastasios’s first collection where the higher a character ascends, the closer they come to the divine (231). Thus, the chapter overall serves to highlight how such short narratives may also have a great deal of complexity in this spatial dimension as well.
This volume certainly does succeed in its stated goals of shedding light on this understudied area of Late Antique and Early Byzantine tales. It does so not only with through furnishing new theoretical frameworks, but also through providing insightful discussion of many aspects of these narratives that many readers may not have considered before (e.g., the impact of repetition, lists, and space), and pointing towards areas for exploring such tales where one might not have anticipated such (e.g., the works of Galen).
One especially commendable feature is the volume’s interdisciplinary nature. In particular, it seems to be among the first works to approach Late Antique/Byzantine texts with elements of folkloristics, a discipline that is particularly well-suited to precisely these matters of orality and marvelous tales. The general inspiration for the volume does seem to be drawn from what little scholarship exists so far on folklore in the earlier centuries of Greco-Roman antiquity. The Introduction, after all, begins by citing notable works by William Hansen, Graham Anderson, and Debbie Felton, each of whom is a major player in this nascent area of ancient folklore, while other elements of the Introduction deal with ideas of the prominent folklorist Vladimir Propp. Another notable work on pre-modern literature that is similarly folklore-inspired has been Jan Ziolkowski’s Fairy Tales from Before Fairy Tales (2007), also mentioned in this Introduction. Whereas Ziolkowski’s work is concerned with bringing folkloristics to studying the literature of the medieval Latin West, this volume serves, in some ways, as an equivalent for the Greek East. Thus, this volume is admirable, both for bringing attention to such understudied short narratives, but also for paving the path for a more widespread “folkloristic turn” within the study of Late Antique and Byzantine literature as a whole.