Teaching Greek in Eleventh-Century Byzantium. Schedography and Its Methods

Project Information

TeaGre

Grant agreement ID: 101068487

DOI

10.3030/101068487

Project terminated on 31 December 2022

EC signature date 28 July 2022

Start date 1 September 2022

End date 31 August 2024

Funded under

• Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)

Total cost

No data

EU contribution

€ 175 920,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITEIT GENT
Belgium

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - TeaGre (Teaching Greek in Eleventh-Century Byzantium. Schedography and Its Methods)

Reporting period: 2022-09-01 to 2024-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The project is a linguistic and literary enquiry of a group of school textbooks and exercises produced in the eleventh-century Byzantine Empire, which are the first referred to as ‘schedography’. Schedography was a Byzantine method of teaching Greek grammar that became very popular during the eleventh century, and was so effective that it was used for five centuries until the early modern period. It is based on testing students’ linguistic skills through texts full of orthographical errors and syntactical complexities. Sources attest to the fact that virtually any educated Byzantine was trained through schedography and that it impacted both high-standard Greek and text production, from lowbrow documents to highly-formalised literary texts. Still, since sources do not extensively describe schedographical teaching, it is hard to understand how it worked, why it was so effective, and the reason behind its invention and its fortune.

The project aimed at producing a modern edition of the earliest schedographical sources (dating back to the eleventh century) and at understanding what language was taught through schedography and to which needs the new method responded. The answer to these challenging questions will disclose how a premodern society develops instruments to process and assimilate change as well as how new teaching methods impact literary production and, more broadly, literacy and language in the long term.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

During my time as MSCA postdoctoral fellow, I acted in a number of different directions. My main activity was to read and compare every manuscript preserving the textbook Digressions on syntax and antistoicha by Longibardos, the longest single-author source preserved from eleventh-century schedography. On the basis of this first research, I wrote and submitted an article for an edited volume titled “Prolegomena to a New Edition of the Handbook by Longibardos”. I collaborated with Andrea Cuomo and his team on the digital platform where my edition of Longibardos will appear, embedded within the other sources that will create the database of the ERC CoG MELA project. In this way, I will also have the opportunity of using digital tools that will ease my own analysis of the texts. I also gathered material and ideas for two articles on schedography, working titles: ‘Rhythm and Education’ and ‘Prepositions in eleventh-century schedographical teaching’. Together with Andrea Cuomo, we organised the first workshop on schedography and thus gathered six international scholars of Medieval Greek linguistics and literary studies at Ghent University.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

My research at Ghent University as MSCA Fellow led to two major scientific outcomes about eleventh-century schedography. First, I realised how much prose rhythm is inherent to the phrasing and the disposition of the material within schedographical texts; this relates schedography to contemporary didactic production in verse, which flourished from the late tenth century onwards. I am finalising an article on this topic. Secondly, some Byzantine literary authors and grammarians spoke about or against peculiarities in the Greek language as taught by teachers using schedography as a method. In order to understand what they are talking about, I started mapping the features of language as displayed by Longibardos’ handbook in order to frame them within the broader context of the eleventh-century Atticised Greek. During my time at UGent, I worked on the collatio and the evaluation of the readings of each manuscript where Longibardos’ handbook is preserved.

At the same time, I consider the workshop one of the most important achievements of my fellowship as it created a moment of beneficial discussion, where every participant both contributed and learnt. This is extremely important when researching complicated sources such as medieval textbooks and school exercises. There is the need for further gatherings of scholars working on Medieval Greek language and Greek grammatical texts, Greek linguistics and Medieval Greek literature to address together all the issues at stake from different perspectives.