Hello, and welcome back to Agnes, the Late Antique, Medieval, and Byzantine podcast. I'm Glenn McDormand, and today I'm talking to Dr. Divna Manilova about scientific and philosophical thought in Late Byzantium. Dr. Manilova earned her Ph.D. from Central European University and is now a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Silesia in Poland. Welcome to the show. Your project is investigating late Byzantine science and philosophy, so I think I'd kind of like to just start.
So the most important thing is that... If you think about the 14th century, you have to start thinking rather earlier. So when we talk about the late Byzantine period, we usually mean the time after 1244, so after the Fourth Crusade, which is really a watershed in Byzantine history because it's the first time Constantinople fell. So the Byzantine capital today is Istanbul and for the first time it fell and surprisingly it fell to other Christians, it fell to the Crusaders.
And that really changes in many ways and really remarkably the Byzantine landscape, the culture. the religion, the language. So on the one hand, you have a huge trauma happening for various reasons. For the first time, the empire is not. does not own its own capital, so some people would term this the empire in exile, this period. And this is a period of around 60 years until they managed to take Constantinople back. So that's one thing that's very important to consider.
smaller political entities that form in the region that was until that point Byzantium and these are Latin speaking. So you have the Genes, you have the Venetians, you have... All these people who just don't move to the Holy Land right away, they rather stay. And of course, Byzantium has had a lot of contact with the West until that point.
like commercial contact or religious negotiation and all that. But it's not like people actually stayed and formed their political entities, their courts. They did not set up as the neighbors of the Byzantines. At the same time... it is also the 13th century and onwards you have coming from the east. yet another culture. So you would have the Seljuks, you would have the Ottomans, so that would mean another religion, yet another language, even another political setup.
And what you could say that is very typical for this period that starts with 1204 is fragmentation. So you have political fragmentation, many smaller entities, political entities. However, there is also the diversification because you have a number of cultures, many more cultures coexisting in the region, quite closely to each other, many alliances being formed, alliances shifting and all that.
And I guess this is the most important thing to have in mind when we speak about the 14th century, because a lot of the things we see in the 14th, in the 15th centuries, these are reactions to what is happening in the region. Byzantium as a political power has to renegotiate its space and has to decide how to survive, how to proceed forward in this new situation.
and because of this fragmentation what you can see also is what some people have called that Byzantium at that point is not really an empire but an archipelago of cities. So you have urban centres which become the focus of... Basically most of the important activities, economic and culture and so on. And for the first time also we see that Constantinople, while it is still the center and the capital and the city.
Well, there are also others which rise in that period, as for instance Thessaloniki. So I think this is the picture we have to have in mind. And once you go to the 14th century, you already have some kind of stability, let's say relative stability, the capital is reconquered. But at the same time there are a lot of internal dynamics which are not so beneficial for the environment.
for the climate, let's say, of the period. So you have two civil wars. So though the Byzantines are back in Constantinople, politically they are not so stable. At the same time, what has been remarked is that despite all these things, it is really a period of cultural revival. A lot of things are booming and one of them is science. We can talk maybe more about what we mean by science when we speak about Byzantium or in general the medieval world.
People have noted and what the listeners should have in mind is that it is the late Byzantine period, so the 13th to 15th centuries more or less. This is the period that gives us the most text about astronomy. And it's really remarkable how much interest there is, how many people could actually practice this on the highest level.
And this, moreover, this comes after more than a century of interruption in the study of the higher mathematical sciences. So just before, you would have, of course, people who know the calculus and, of course, taxation. And the need of it did not allow for mathematical skills to disappear. You have also trade and so on. However, no one really was or very few people were really capable of doing.
more complicated astronomical calculations, for instance, calculating when an eclipse will happen or knowing that the data they are using, the astronomical tables they are using. have to be updated and how they have to be updated to keep up with the current situation. Because in some cases you may have like a copy.
of an astronomical table which gives you values for the ninth century for instance so you have to be able to update it to make up for the difference in the hours and to be more precise when you calculate the date of Easter for instance or an eclipse or whatever you need to do. So I think these are somehow
various important aspects of the period. And of course, there are many more things that happen, but I guess that's a good starting point. You've talked a little bit about what science is in this period. What is philosophy and other type of learning like in Byzantium in this period? First of all, I think that, at least my opinion, is that in general, in that period, but I would say in Byzantium...
speaking, you know, generally speaking, talking about the whole period, I wouldn't put science outside of philosophy. So I think we should first conceive of philosophy in a kind of a wider sense in which you have... You sort of start from logic, basically, and the syllogistic theory that you inherit from Aristotle. So you know how to form a proof, let's say, you know how to say that if X and Y, then Z. And you don't need to necessarily proceed further, but if you did...
Then you could read the commentators to Aristotle and you could eventually even read Plato and Aristotle's natural philosophy, physics and... even his psychological theories of the anima and so on. So I would say you start with logic but you also touch upon some areas like physics and natural philosophy that also lead to what we would refer to if we speak about science, namely the mathematical sciences. And these are in the traditional division.
of course, algebra, geometry, astronomy and harmonics. So I think the first two, algebra and geometry, are kind of... they give you some sort of basis and you really don't do not need to proceed further but of course once you have done the geometry part unless you want to confine yourself to working as a basically land measure
and solving disputes in the court about who has the right over this part of land, how big it is and so on. You could also continue and do astronomy and harmonics and that will be really the highest part.
And philosophy would come after this, so it would come after the mathematics, but some part of it, some areas of it really connect to what astronomy is also dealing with, for instance. So if you imagine the... the sky right so I mean an astronomer would look at the sky and think about the movements of the heavenly bodies and what's generally happening out there but the physicist can also look at the sky
and could say, well, you know, according to the prevalent and the time element of theory, so you would say that, you know, this part of the heavenly sphere is ether, and this part... is fire or, you know, you could discuss why the heavenly bodies move in the way they do, precisely because they are bodies, so they are made up of elements.
And if you deal with physics, this is one of the things you would be talking about. So they are over overlaps is what I'm saying. And basically philosophy in this wider sense is just the engagement. with the world, with the natural world and why this is the way it is. But also it can go higher, so you can also engage with the intellectual world.
What is my intellect? Why do I think? How do I think about it? Why do I speak in a certain way? So nowadays we have lots of divisions, right? So we would have philosophy of language, we would have ethics, we would have... a number of subgroups of what for a long time in European history was just philosophy, basically, and not only in the Middle Ages. And now from the point of view of the scholar... what we really struggle with is how to talk about it.
Because obviously we live today, so we have certain terminology and certain divisions. Even when we went to school, we studied in a certain way, right? So we know about certain divisions of the sciences. You learn about the Middle Ages and even earlier you learn about late antiquity. So you have this division of the sciences or of the types of knowledge. Maybe it's more accurate to use this phrase. Which care is true.
the Middle Ages, Byzantium included. However, you know that the division and the limits of those different areas of knowledge are not exactly the same in every period, in every place, but they are still roughly the same. And at the same time, we use our own language. We inevitably do mistakes because when I speak about science, most people will think about exact science, right?
Whereas I mean something more, I don't know, more vague maybe, it would seem to the modern reader, because when you read Byzantine astronomical texts, You would see the calculations. However, you would, for instance, have also a very elaborate rhetorical preface. And from today's point of view, why would they do that? I mean, it's important that the scientific text is also...
beautiful, it's also pleasant to read. Why would you have worded place in a scientific text? You don't need to, but in Byzantium that was actually important. And, for instance, one example I can give you, which I was working on lately. So there is a very famous, let's say, menu or textbook. from the 11th century, which so far the status quo says it was written in the year 1007.
but the first manuscript we have of this book is from the 1040. So 11th century textbook you have in which you have five parts. The first is on logic and then you have four parts on the mathematical sciences. In the Codex from the 1040, which preserves this book, you would have subtitles for each of the chapters, right? And each of those subtitles... is written in jambic trimeter, so it is written in a metrical form. This is not exactly poetry.
But it is basically a title using the basic blocks of poetry, one of the main types of meters. So it is also pleasant to hear. However, these are still just titles of subsections in a book you should be using for education. Nevertheless, they are beautiful. And I asked recently a colleague, Floris Bernard, who works on exactly that type of material, so I just asked him, why would they do this?
And he said, well, you know, in the 11th century and the 12th century, the students really liked those things. So I think there is a, I guess what I learned. During my PhD and now working on this particular project Okay, many things I cannot define and I still cannot tell you exactly what philosophy is, but I also think it is
the wrong question because obviously it would mean different things in different contexts. It will have a monastic meaning, a scholarly meaning and so on. But one thing I am quite convinced of is that in Byzantium First of all, you cannot really understand the sciences, these four mathematical sciences, outside of this larger framework of philosophy generally understood. That's one thing and the other thing that all those fields which we now perceive as rather
I mean, to be scientific you have to be dry, right? Your style has to be severe. It has to be exact, no flourishes and no rhetoric. And in Byzantium that was not the case. Of course, when you have a text intended for education in astronomy or philosophy, that text has to be functional, so it is not as rhetorical as a narration would be.
However, it is still a beautiful text in which the author plays with the language to the extent that is allowed. And I think that's very, very specific to Byzantium, really. Once you decided to go on the path of this kind of high scholarship, so once you acquired this education and decided to practice it, then you practiced really all of those aspects together. So you would write.
about an eclipse and you would introduce a rhetorical preface and you would have references to the things you know from Aristotle or Plato that are part of your education anyways, even if they don't pertain very strictly. to the precise subject matter of the text. You mentioned that there are a lot of scientific and philosophical texts in this period as part of a cultural flourishing. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more about why we see so many of these types of texts in this period.
Another great question, which I'm not sure if it has been completely answered. So, of course, there are various theories about this. And so on the one hand... you could say that there is a sort of a cultural competition going on so right now there are lots of lots of factors on the stage and in some of those
some of those cultures as for instance in Islamic culture astronomy is featured very prominently to the extent that you also have the court title of a court astronomer for instance and you would have quite advanced astronomical and mathematical science and also very accurate up-to-date calculations. That would also be happening in Jewish culture at the time, for instance, and in Latin medieval culture at the time, because obviously...
on the Latin and Christian side, then you need to calculate the data faster. And by that time, there are no more debates on how the computers is done. So you have a number of people, quite a lot, many who are capable of doing this. And in this setting now Byzantium or the Byzantines now are quite close to those other cultures. And one explanation could be that, well, this is...
This is a way to compete and to show superiority because what does Byzantium have, what the others don't? Byzantium is the legitimate, in their view, heir of Greek astronomy. Ptolemy wrote in Greek. He didn't write in Latin, he didn't write in Arabic and so on. And it is Byzantium who preserves that heritage and preserves it not in translation. And that's a very specific role. So they have the right claim on it. At the same time, what happens is that by way of preserving...
There is also the danger that you are not updating the data you're having because Probably not such an easy thing to update something that is supposed to be the final answer on the questions of astronomy, for instance. However, while a Byzantine would not dare, let's say, to update Ptolemy's Ptolemy's data at the same time of course if you are already an astronomer and you are quite
capable in what you do, you are aware that in your neighboring culture that somebody in Latin or somebody in Arabic or somebody in Syria is writing with very accurate data. So there is this type of tension.
and this may be one partial answer to what's happening at the same time so this may be understood in the also in the general uh in the general direction of at that time after such a crisis after having closed the capital living in political fragmentation obviously there is a crisis of identity as well so There are various strategies at play connected to language, religion and cultural heritage that are being employed by a number of
the important actors on the scene, intellectuals, emperors and patriarchs and so on, the elite, let's say. as to defending, creating, reinventing what being Byzantine means. Now, that's also a very hotly debated subject, what Byzantine means in the 14th and 15th century, when this Hellenic identity is reappearing. The term Helene from just meaning pagan starts meaning basically Greek. So some people talk about the beginning, the first appearances of this proto-Greek national identity.
I don't want to go there but the point is what no one can deny is that really there is a crisis and it has to be renovated in some sort of way and that way it has to be also convincing. to all the people who still live there, right? And having to re-employ the grand figures of Hellenistic knowledge and ancient Greek knowledge.
such as Ptolemy for instance, might be also one such strategy. And it is quite significant, I think, that it is in the end of the 13th and the beginning of the 14th century. that you have a lot of the Ptolemies heritage being rediscovered, re-edited and recirculated in Byzantium. It's not only astronomy. but also Ptolemy's geography gets rediscovered so to speak and your addition is prepared with maps. So you have a lot of this knowledge which probably has not been used for some time.
Now it's updated, re-edited and put into circulation. And the same happens, for instance, with Plutarch. So there are a number of really monumental works that are being reintroduced. So, so far two aspects, the ideological competition with the neighbors and then possibly this kind of rediscovering of one's identity.
Of course other arguments have also been made so for instance when we think of astronomy we should also consider that if one was able to make an astronomical calculation the same person easily could. also make a prediction. So you have the same type of knowledge, you can make the calculation and it's only one step to interpreting it in some sort of way.
So that has also been said that it is a period of a lot of cataclysms. So you have earthquakes, you have civil wars, you have the Ottoman threat, you have really... an unusual amount of solar eclipses being observed in Constantinople in the 14th century. It just happens. So also comets and so on. So you could speak. even about this kind of apocalyptic feeling that a number of strange, curious occurrences are happening in the world around.
And this also can contribute to a higher interest, increasing interest in things like astronomy and astrology. I don't know if any of those answers really answers the whole question, right? I mean, but there are certainly elements to the answer to your question. So who are the people then who are engaged in this?
project or these projects? Who are the people who are writing these texts and what else do they do? Are they writing other types of texts? Are they involved in court politics in the Byzantine Empire? now again to what we discussed about philosophy in wider sense and in addition it kind of really relates to my current project so In that particular period, so in the first half of the 14th century, perhaps the two most important proponents of reintroducing Ptolemy and practicing astronomy.
are Theodore Metohitis and Nikifogos Gregogast. And one is the master, the other is his student. Of course, metohitis so the older uh person in that particular couple they he also had his own teachers uh and google gas then ends up having a number of students who developed even further what he started together with Metohittes. But at least to me, these two guys and their partnership as master and student, they are really the first...
serious proponents of this idea of re-restoring the study of astronomy, of Ptolemaic astronomy. And Metohydes himself, he was a very powerful political figure. He occupied the sort of position in the Byzantine government in the beginning of the 14th century that you would have with the prime minister today or a chancellor, something like that.
So not only that he was politically powerful, but he was of course, he had access to financial resources that other people didn't, which allowed him, among other things, also to sponsor the production of books, the copying of certain type of works. including as part of this process also to promote his own students who in turn basically took care of preserving Metohydides' heritage by supervising and participating in the process of copying and editing his teacher's work on.
treatises. So what's happening is that the two of them, on the one hand, they copy old things and re-edit them. And on the other hand, Mentohitis himself wrote on astronomy and on philosophy. student was responsible for basically ensuring that his library, his legacy exists and survives. And what is very good for us who started this period is that basically you have a lot of surviving evidence, so you have lots of manuscripts.
and a lot of them include autographed remarks or are in part or fully copied by the 14th century scholars, and Gregogast in particular. is one of the scholars whose hand has been recognized quite early it's a very characteristic hand which is also why we know of so far i think around
between 60 and 70 manuscripts have been identified as copied by him, annotated by him, and basically part of his library. And what is important also is that Because of Metohedisi's position and his personal wealth, he was able to restore a certain monastery, Koga monastery, which is Kagi-Ajami. today in Istanbul or Kage and Müzesi because it's still also a museum. Now we can see only the church.
the church which was turned mosque now it is a museum but it was a large monastic complex and he created a library there which probably at the time was one of the best libraries not only not one of the best libraries in the city, but also one of the best libraries on issues like astronomy, since this is what he was interested in. And that would also mean that Grigoraz and then Grigoraz's own students
As long as they were part of this circle, they had access to this kind of resource, which was really unprecedented. And that, of course, meant that in turn their own production. could relate on the archive they were using. And this really wouldn't have happened if the first person in the chain, Meduhitis, did not have a very powerful political and financial position.
Of course, he also suffered a huge downfall at some point. And since his own patron was the Emperor at the time, Andronicus II, and when he was... overthrown by his own grandson. Metohydes also lost all his privilege and had to go in exile and died only two years afterwards. So he didn't fare so well at the end of his life. However,
Though this affected his student Grigogas, Grigogas was allowed to stay in the capital. And I think this was quite important because then he also could continue work even if he was associated with somebody who has... fallen in disgrace by the time. So if some of these scholars, some of these scientists are being patronized by the emperor, who is their work for? Is it simply for the court? Is it simply for the emperor? Who is reading their work? And I guess, how is their work being used?
the work is very much for the patron if there is such and in this in the cases we are speaking about Until Andronikos II was the Emperor, he was probably the most important patron of philosophy and astronomy. But basically after the 1330s, when we entered... in a succession of rulers and it is not always clear who will prevail at the end. Then I guess you also have a proliferation of important figures at the time, so not only the Emperor but others.
contestants for this prime place in the society who the scholars are addressing. which works that they hope will gain some sort of further funding and support. So on the one hand, of course, there is this point. Yeah, there is the patron who is... able financially to support the scholar if they share the same interest. At the same time, by the 14th century, but the process starts already.
towards the end of the 10th and really picks up in the 11th and the 12th century. The group of educated people who can work as tutors and as teachers though they don't necessarily come from a prominent family. So these people sort of rise. and establish themselves in society in the 11th and 12th centuries and by the 14th century this is quite the status quo that you would have people working as
private teachers, so they would be paid by basically their students or the parents of their students. Since you would need a certain education to be employed in the imperial or ecclesiastical administration. which is basically what education probably mostly was. The reason why education was something to aspire to was to be able to be employed in a certain way.
So I guess in this sense you could also aim at another audience would be all these aspiring students. And that's also important because since in Byzantium at that time And you don't have the same structure you have in the West. So by the 14th century, you have the universities in the West. You have the University of Paris, you have the University of Oxford and so on.
They have established framework, they have an established curriculum. It is very well known what you do as a student, what you study, how you graduate. Byzantium never develops anything like those universities. Of course, they are schools supported by the emperor, by the patriarch, and then private schools, but nothing like the universities.
which appear in the late Middle Ages and we know until today. So in this context when a lot of the education is done basically in a private circle where the master is kind of setting the tone and basically leading all the students around their own interests. You can also imagine that this circles function is a little bit more than simply educational circles, they become also circles of friendship.
They become also circles of power. And they are extremely important for the future networking, let's say, of all these people involved. So that's why I'm saying this not... simply because I want to mention it, but also because that may be important for us if we want to understand why certain scholars choose certain works it is not necessarily only your own vocation your own passion but your one is always aware of their patrons but also possibly of their future patrons
So many of those students can rise into power. Many of those students are not just random. So I think that's another part of the audience that we need to consider. Perhaps the third very important aspect, which is characteristic of Byzantine society, again, probably from the end of the 10th, in the 11th century onwards. but surely in the Paleologian period is that a practice that is quite well attested in the late Byzantine period is the so-called theatron or theater, if you like.
So we should imagine this as a sort of literary salon organized by a powerful individual or let's say one of these intellectuals that we speak about where other similarly educated people will meet and basically works will be read aloud and the audience will react to it. in many cases this could be very rhetorical works really meant to be performed but surprisingly for us maybe other types of works also are being read such as letters.
for instance, and even astronomical letters. So in the case of Gregoras, we have another person in the period, Gregoria Kindinus from Thessaloniki, writing about one letter that Gregogast sent to Thessaloniki which was on astronomy and which was being publicly read and people were clapping and reacting positively to it. So I think you always have... the audience of all your peers as well. And we also should consider that as part of the public. Because after all, if you imagine how many people...
in the 14th century had access to this kind of education. You know, it's not so many as we have today. So you could assume that They, of course, knew of each other, they knew of each other's works and they scrutinized each other quite severely. And one place that this happened is in this kind of gatherings and in this kind of... Spectacles, basically. So you've talked here a little bit about the social context of these thinkers and also about the development of...
of the university in the West. And so I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how these texts and the figures who wrote them fit within sort of these traditional narratives of intellectual history in, say, the Western medieval world and also the medieval era. Let me start by saying that when I conceived this project, it was not my initial idea to challenge these conceptions, right?
I didn't even think about it. What I thought about was that I wanted to really understand when one in Byzantium said that they knew things, that they were polymath. polymaths, which is a word we use today to describe many of those people. So many of the medieval thinkers, if they wrote in more than one genre, we call them polymaths. So I was just curious. Why do we do that? And does it mean the same thing? And if one is supposed to know many things, which are exactly those many things?
and what happens when we look at literature produced for education, like textbooks and such. So do we really see that those works we consider classic were studied by the Byzantine students. So this was my initial inspiration. And then on the second step, because part of my initial work I did in the Institute of Advanced Studies of the University of Bukavec, Romania, which at the time was the group of researchers that were there at the time.
In the humanities division most of them were philosophers and historians of science. Then I appeared and I was not only the only person who did something before the 16th century. But also I was speaking about the culture entirely unknown to them. And one reason why it is unknown, well, it is written in Greek. It is not written in Latin.
Basically, at that point, I introduced another concept in the project, namely curiosity. And curiosity, as you know, it's something that we really associate with things happening post the 17th century. We talk about the scientific revolution. We know that the mind becomes curious and now we want to know everything. We know about cabinets of curiosities and all that. At the same time, speaking from a Western perspective,
We also know that Augustine spoke famously against curiosity and we know that Thomas Aquinas would speak against curiosity as vice and something we are not supposed to do and studiosity i guess would be the equivalent of the latin would be something that we can do something that is not is appreciated in the scholarly mind. And then I thought, okay, if all these people had an opinion, and obviously some people were curious after the 16th century, what happened before?
Why is it that Byzantium is left out of the picture? And of course, this is because there is another very prevalent narrative that says, and we spoke a little bit about it when I spoke about the preservation of the Hellenic wisdom. So usually what we think is that Byzantium is a very traditional place, a very orthodox place. It's a place that doesn't innovate and doesn't change anything. scholars are showing constantly in all the sub-fields of Byzantine studies.
that innovation, change, subversion, all these things really do happen and they tend to happen naturally and perhaps more understatedly than we would expect. And one reason why it is difficult to assess the subversion and innovation is I think precisely what I pointed to, namely the high degree. to which this culture relies on rhetoric. So in order to really understand the subtle shifts, you need to go into the language and to go deep. And let's face it, it's not like...
knowing medieval Greek is the primary skill of the researcher today. So I think all these things combined form sort of the background I'm trying to go. against right so and in this sense um of course we cannot deny uh i mean that that would be totally nonsense to say that Byzantium produced something equivalent to the medieval university or that it innovated logic in the way the West did.
or that in terms of science at the time it was much better than its Islamic counterpart. If we pose the question in this way, then the answer always will be no. it didn't do as much, it was not as original. I just think that the question is entirely wrong, because posing the question in this way, who is better, who did more, who did something more original, doesn't really...
lead to anything productive when it comes to Byzantium. I think Byzantium is a very special case in medieval history when you really have to take it in its own terms. but seriously take it in its own terms. I know you can say it for each culture, but I think in the Byzantine case, it's quite specific. And there are a number of reasons for this. And I think it really has a lot to do with the long...
political continuity of this political entity. So you have around 1000 years of basic continuity of the Byzantine Empire. And you don't have any other... medieval political entity that has that. That continuity also ensures more or less linguistic continuity.
a later point onwards so not from the 14th century or from the fourth century but eventually after iconoclasm i know that you also have a religious homogeneity and continuity i think well when us scholarly mind is born in this kind of environment with so much heritage and with so much legacy, obviously their strategies will be rather different.
someone born in a newer intellectual environment. And once you take Byzantium on its own terms, then you can see that I think, at least this is my preliminary thinking about it, I think It is not a question of being capable of doing the same that was done in the West or something similar. I think it was just not necessary or considered necessary according to how they saw their society. So in the way the whole system is set up politically and socially, I guess.
it didn't make sense to have the type of university you get in the West. When we read Byzantium or look at Byzantium, we should of course borrow inspiration and methodological approaches from what has been done by other scholars of medieval Europe. And we should think of the West as a counterpart, for instance, just to see things which we otherwise would not.
show themselves as particularly interesting, but at the same time I don't think we should judge Byzantium in the same terms we judge its eastern or western neighbour. Obviously they had different needs. And this is why the education was organized differently. This is why the school curriculum was organized differently. And this is also why you get certain types of texts.
and you don't get, for instance, Summa Theologiae or something like that. I think we should consider that it is something that is in the making for quite a long time. a question of a decision you should take from yesterday for today and something that involves really each aspect of the society rather than compartment compartmentalizing education as something separate from
politics, from economy, and so on. Just as a footnote, if one wants to nevertheless say that Byzantium has importance and influence on the scientific front, Some directions that are really exciting to pursue is really on the one hand what happens with all the Byzantine manuscripts that would enter Europe through Italy after the conquest of Constantinople.
in 1453 and it is another thing that at least I have in mind exploring is to see in what way some of those Byzantine authors were or appeared interesting to really those main figures of the scientific revolution and forward, because it really seems to be the case that they were members, for instance, of the Royal Society. or German scholars in the 17th century, which were quite, which were reading Greek and Byzantine texts and were quite inspired by them. So Kepler.
Copernicus or even, for instance, famously Halley, he mentions Gregoras as the first comet observation in his catalogue of comets. So I think if we... Probably we are more to be accused of being blind of Byzantium's achievements than those guys in the 16th and the 17th century.
Well, that leads into, I think, probably what will be my final question here, which is to get at how you're doing the work that you're doing. And so I'm very interested in the manuscript traditions and where you find these texts, where you have to go. go to do your research and how you have access to these writings? Obviously, when we speak about education, you're quite right that the manuscripts are perhaps the most important source, and it's also kind of impossible.
source to work on because what I wanted to look at and what I'm interested in right now is really to see educational miscellaneous. So basically codices in which you have a compilation of texts, shorter, longer, sometimes untitled, which I think were intended.
for schooling purposes and of course when we talk about this type of text so multi-text codecs intended for school purposes this is these are really way too many and we have them all around Europe obviously and at the moment I'm studying manuscripts here in Poland which actually happened to be a surprising place. I was surprised to discover in a number of local libraries, so in Krakow, Warsaw and Wroclaw, very interesting 14th century Byzantine manuscripts.
And I never knew that Poland was a good place for Byzantine manuscript studies. And another place I'm currently working in are German libraries, which also... have quite good archives when it comes to Byzantium. Now, the problem that I'm having is that there are way too many texts that fit my criteria. So what I'm doing is basically identifying key texts or topics that are
I think, the most representative or most important, and authors that I think are symptomatic for the study of a certain subject. So, for instance, I've been interested in following the tradition of Aristoteles' Methodologica. because it will be a text that fits into the education on astronomy and physics and celestial phenomena, which are...
I don't mean eclipses and the movement of the big heavenly bodies, but things really like comets and meteorites and so on. And what I am interested in is also a few things.
when somebody copies such a text do they copy the whole thing or do they make a selection and if they do a selection what does it tell us what do they write in the margin so obviously which passages are obscure, so they need more explanation, which passages are marked as important, you should read this, and which passages invoke some further information being added from another source.
And one thing that has been increasingly helpful and I think many of us are benefiting is the fact that a lot of libraries now are digitizing their collections. because otherwise it would be difficult for me to make the case that I have seen only, let's say, manuscripts in these five countries because the access was easy as I was in Europe or in certain parts of Europe.
To have a comprehensive view you really should go everywhere but we know that's not so easy and we don't have so much time. So I think the fact that libraries are opening up and putting digital reproductions online is really a great thing. for all of us who work with manuscripts. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak to me. Thank you, Glenn, for having me and for all your wonderful questions.
Well, that's it for this episode. And with the close of the academic term in the U.S., Agnes will be on winter break until February. In the meantime, I'd like to invite you to check out one of Clay Temple Media's other shows, The Gene Wolfe Literary Podcast, an audiobook club exploring the work of Proustian science fiction writer Gene Wolfe, whose first short story...
is about an archaeologist. You can find the podcast on our website or through whichever podcasting app you use. I'm Glenn McDormand, and until next time, awe atque wale.