Toward a Historical Sociolinguistic Poetics of Medieval Greek

How can historical sociolinguistic analyses of Medieval Greek aid in the interpretation of Medieval Greek texts? This is the main question addressed by the papers collected in this volume. Historical sociolinguistics (HSL) is a discipline that combines linguistic, social, historical, and philological sciences, and suggests that a language cannot be studied apart from its social dimension. Similarly, the study of a language in its social dimension is nothing else than the study of communication between members of a given speech community by the means of written texts, the shared “signs” used by authors to communicate with their audiences.

This volume is divided into two parts. In the first, Cuomo’s and Bentein’s papers aim to offer an overview of the discipline and examples of applied HSL. Valente’s, Bianconi’s, and Pérez-Martín’s papers show how the context of production and reception of Byzantine texts should be studied. These are followed by Horrocks’ study on some features of Atticized Medieval Greek. In the second part, the contributions by Telelis, Odorico, and Manolova focus on the context of reception of texts by Georgios Pachymeres, Theodoros Pediasimos, and Nikephoros Gregoras respectively.