Exploring the novel’s reception in late antiquity and the Middle Ages
How were ancient novels received at and during the first millennium after their time of writing? The earliest novels date back to the first centuries of the Common Era, yet analysis of their reception mainly stretches back to the 11th and 12th centuries. This knowledge gap means that our understanding of narrative and the history of fiction itself is incomplete. “For preceding eras, it was (and is) more difficult to reconstruct the circulation of ancient novels (and of ancient literature in general) because of the lack of sources,” explains Koen De Temmerman(opens in new window), full professor of Classics at the Department of Literary Studies at Ghent University. “We have known for a long time that ancient Greek novels – the main focus of this project – were being read and copied in the medieval Greek world (Byzantium) around the beginning of the second millennium AD onwards.” Ancient novels were written in Greek or Latin, and prior to the Middle Ages existed only on papyri. Those that weren’t copied onto parchment were mostly lost forever. For a long time the only information available to scholars was what later authors had written about these novels. Yet even these ‘testimonia’ were few and far between. “For some scholars, this is sufficient reason to assume that in these eras ancient novels were not (widely) read,” adds De Temmerman. In the NovelEchoes project, which was funded by the European Research Council(opens in new window) (ERC), and is a follow-up to the ERC-funded NOVELSAINTS project, De Temmerman and his colleagues adopted a contrasting starting point. “The presence of ancient novels in Byzantine manuscripts and imitations is difficult to explain without assuming a pre-existing circulation,” De Temmerman notes. “They cannot have come out of nowhere.”
Seeking clues about the early circulation of novels
With finite early sources, the team set out to detect and interpret implicit references to, allusions to and citations from ancient novels in late antique and early medieval texts. To inventory their findings, a highly detailed online, searchable and expandable database was created, charting – for the first time – intertextual references and allusions to ancient novels, along with testimonia. The research identified and interpreted many unknown or discarded references to ancient novels in later texts from virtually every genre, considerably broadening our knowledge of their reception. “We have thus shown that the reception of the ancient novel in late antiquity and the Middle Ages up to the 12th century is much more extensive than scholars believed,” says De Temmerman. Beyond their work establishing a firm methodology for studying the reception of ancient novels, the NovelEchoes team also produced several critical text editions of previously unpublished narrative texts. “A significant part of the work involved the production of in-depth studies interpreting these newly discovered receptions,” notes De Temmerman, including analysis of the history of fiction itself.
Analysing narratives from unexplored periods
“Every answer elicits new questions,” adds De Temmerman of continuing the research. “Much to my delight, two smaller-scale follow-up projects probing new directions have already started, thanks to funding of the Flemish Research Council (F.W.O.-Vlaanderen)” he says. These projects dive into other sets of scarcely analysed narratives of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. “In a sense, the work has only just begun,” says De Temmerman.
