| Abstract |
The author of this dissertation had three main objectives. The first one was to present the Greek oracle-books of the 16th century (about fifty manuscripts altogether) in a way able to provide a more accurate and complete understanding of their content, either texts or images (or images for which space was bound on the page, but finally it left empty). The second one was to propose methodological tools for the analysis of the peculiarly interrelated elements of this content. The third objective was to articulate the historical problem emerged in these manuscripts as written and illustrated sources, as well as to propose a point of view for addressing this problem. The discussion evolves in two stages. The first part, descriptive (chapters 1 to 5), exposes and classifies the material in order to establish the affinities between the manuscripts (chapter 5). The families of the manuscripts were found to be three, A, B, and C, making up the trunk of a complex network, peculiar in its continuous contaminations. Chapter 6 throws a bridge across the two stages of the discussion: it deals with the production of the oracle-books, bringing to the forefront the people who made them. The second part, explanatory (chapters 7 to 9), attempts to “reconstruct” the interpretations applied to the oracles from the beginning of the 13th to the end of the 16th century, and also to point out (as possible) the main historical causes that imposed them. The oracle-books were not popular or religious representations of reality, nor they were merely fascinating and widely disseminated readings; they were a decisive factor in the formation of political sphere. They were a kind of political program articulated on the basis of the political conjuncture. Every single manuscript presents its own peculiarities, and each family of manuscripts develops its own narrative, evolving and changing over the course of time, redefined from one manuscript to another. Consequently, in the Greek oracle-books in the 16th century we may see in progress segments of the producers’ and readers’ political identity. They all accredited loyalty to Byzantium retrospectively, not merely as the state they had and lost, but as their historical heritage, as a political, religious, and cultural patrimony. This reference was concentrated on the person of a predictable “optimal king”, the star of oracular narratives, which would relinquish the thread of the Byzantine emperors, would bind all the churches under Orthodox doctrine and would be recognized as superior by all modern rulers in his time. Their identity invoked Antiquity in a triple sense: political (Roman-Byzantine Empire), religious (Orthodoxy), cultural (Greek language and a new awareness of the home country: patris). Organized around the political element, these three references, broadly appreciated in 16th century Europe for different reasons, combined a historical argument that assured moral supremacy over the politically dominant identities, and directed its supporters from the lost to the promised kingdom; from the present to the future.
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Εικονογραφημένοι χρησμοί του Λέοντος του Σοφού : από τη βυζαντινή εποχή στην πρώτη έντυπη έκδοση (1596)
