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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 December 2024
In 1478 a Byzantine courtier-turned-monk named George Sphrantzes related in a work conventionally called the Chronicon Minus the story of his life and times in the decades before and after the Ottoman conquest of Byzantium. The work's English translator, Marios Philippides, notes in his introduction that ‘students of history, sociology, and literature will find passages of interest in Sphrantzes’ account. In addition to its immense value as a historical testimony, Sphrantzes’ narrative is a linguistic document of great significance to the study of the evolution of the modern Greek language.’ (This latter point refers to Sphrantzes’ fifteenth-century idiom, very different from the classicizing or Atticizing style of pre-conquest Greek historiography.)1 Philippides’ approach reflects typical historiographical praxis in modern scholarship: a source text is strip-mined for those facts for which the empiricist historian is searching, and the rest is ignored or derided as superfluous.
1 Philippides, M., The Fall of the Byzantine Empire: a chronicle by George Sphrantzes, 1401–1477 (Amherst 1980) 13Google Scholar.
2 See e.g. Engdahl, H. (ed.), Witness Literature: proceedings of the Nobel centennial (River Edge NJ 2003)Google Scholar.
3 Wiesel, E., ‘The Holocaust as literary inspiration’ in Wiesel, E. et al (eds) Dimensions of the Holocaust (Evanston 1990) 5–19Google Scholar (9).
4 R. Gordon ‘Introduction: Bare Witness’ in Levi, P., Auschwitz Testimonies: 1945–1986, tr. Woolf, J. (Cambridge 2006)Google Scholar i-xi (iii).
5 On Hayden White's definition: ‘a narrative prose discourse that purports to be a model, or icon, of past structures and processes in the interest of explaining what they were by representing them’: Metahistory: the historical imagination in nineteenth-century Europe (Baltimore 2014) 2.
6 On Philippe Lejeune's definition: a ‘retrospective prose narrative written by a real person concerning his own existence, where the focus is his individual life, in particular the story of his personality’: On Autobiography, ed. P.J. Eakin (Minneapolis 1989) 4.
7 See e.g. Hinterberger, M., Autobiographische Traditionen in Byzanz (Vienna 1999)Google Scholar, esp. 332, 342–3.
8 Neville, L., Guide to Byzantine Historical Writing (Cambridge 2018)Google Scholar, esp. 302–7.
9 Wiesel, E., Night (New York 2006)Google Scholar no page.
10 Derrida, J., Specters of Marx: the state of the debt, the work of mourning and the new international, tr. Kamuf, P. (New York 1994)Google Scholar 63.
11 Levi, P., If This is a Man, tr. Woolf, S. (New York 1959)Google Scholar 92.
12 Levi, If This is a Man, 92.
13 Levi, If This is a Man, 98.
14 Neville, Guide, 303.
15 Sphr. Chron.Min.Pro. All citations from Sphrantzes are from Philippides, Fall. Sphrantzes’ wish to have perished in childhood was no mere rhetoric; as he records later in the Chronicle, two of his sons died in infancy, for which see A-M. Talbot, ‘The death and commemoration of Byzantine children’, in A. Papaconstantinou and A-M. Talbot (eds), Becoming Byzantine: children and childhood in Byzantium, (Washington DC 2009) 283–208 (293).
16 Sphr.Chron.Min.17.10.
17 Sphr. Chron.Min.19.4.
18 Sphr. Chron.Min.37.3
19 Sphr. Chron.Min.37.9.
20 I. De Jong Narrators and Focalizers: the presentation of the story in the Iliad (Bristol 1996).
21 Hom. Il.18.454-6, my translation.
22 Kam. Ex.Thess.2, from J Kaminiates, The Capture of Thessaloniki, tr. D. Frendo and A. Fotiou (Leiden 2002).
23 Chon. Hist. 645, from N. Choniates. Histories, O City of Byzantium, Annals of Niketas Choniates, tr. H. Magoulias (Detroit 1986).
24 L. Neville, Anna Komnene: the life and work of a medieval historian (Oxford 2016) 163. Neville critiques the traditional scholarly view of her writing ‘as something she did to pass the time after her life was over, sitting in prison and stewing in hatred’ (6). I am grateful to David Ricks for pointing out that in his poem ‘Anna Komnene’ (1917), the Alexandrian poet CP Cavafy notes Anna's grief while writing her history.
25 Eust. Capta Thess. 2, from Eustathios of Thessaloniki, The Capture of Thessaloniki, tr. J. Melville-Jones (Canberra 1988).
26 For Niketas as ‘refugee historian’ and the difficult circumstances under which he revised his History, see Goldwyn, Witness Literature, 257-8.
27 Philippides, M., Constantine XI Dragaš Palaeologus (1404–1453): the last emperor of Byzantium (New York 2018) 247Google Scholar.
28 Laub, D. and Felman, S., Testimony: crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and history (New York 1992) 59Google Scholar. Laub's discussion of this moment has been widely discussed; of particular note is Thomas Trezise's article-length critique, in which he argues that ‘these anonymous historians collectively constitute, for Laub, little more than a convenient straw man’ (Trezise, T., ‘Between history and psychoanalysis: a case study in the reception of Holocaust survivor testimony’, History and Memory 20.1 (2008) 7–47 (12)Google Scholar). For a more comprehensive discussion of these passages, see Goldwyn, Witness Literature (2021), 66.
29 Laub and Felman, Witnessing, 59–60.
30 Laub and Felman, Witnessing, 62.
31 Laub and Felman, Witnessing, 63.
32 Laub and Felman, Witnessing, 60.
33 Sphr. Chron.Min.45.1.
34 Sphr. Chron.Min.48.1
35 Sphr. Chron.Min.48.2
36 Sphr. Chron.Min.48.4
37 Sphr. Chron.Min.48.4