TeaGre · Teaching Greek in Eleventh-Century Byzantium. Schedography and Its Methods
Horizon Europe — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2022-09-01 → 2024-08-31
- EU contribution
- €175,920
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Teaching Greek in Eleventh-Century Byzantium. Schedography and Its Methods
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.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Schedography is a Byzantine method of teaching Greek grammar that was popular from the eleventh century to the early modern period. The study of this method enables a better understanding of 1) which kind of Greek was taught and how its teaching was conducted in medieval schools; 2) the influence of school curriculum on writing and reading practices in Byzantium; 3) the purposes of Byzantine education and cultural politics. The existent studies offer sound, but general, overviews and several schedographic sources are unedited. Furthermore, there is the lack of a consistent approach to the study of the edited schedographic sources. My project addresses this issue by looking at the eleventh century, when this method began to spread. I will frame schedography within the context of eleventh-century Byzantine culture and of contemporary school practices. Furthermore, I will examine the most relevant source for this period, the handbook by Longibardos, to describe its teaching method through a linguistic and stylistic analysis. My project will also lead to a critical edition of Longibardos handbook and other unedited eleventh-century schedographic remnants. TeaGre will offer both the first study of schedography and its early evolution as well as a consistent linguistic and stylistic approach to schedographic sources. The simultaneous presence of the ERC-funded projects MELA and EVWRIT at Ghent University places my MSCA Fellowship within a context of substantial and innovative research on Classical, Late Antique and Medieval Greek language and education. The edition of Longibardos and eleventh-century schedographic texts will also expand the database for the study of Greek literature and language that is currently being developed at Ghent University. Through this fellowship, I will improve my professional profile into a more complete Greek scholar and my project will provide me with the proof of concept for my further research on this topic.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITEIT GENT · GentCoordinatorBelgium
Links
- View on CORDIS
- DOI: 10.3030/101068487
- https://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/documents/downloadPublic?documentIds=080166e5f42202f5&appId=PPGMS
- https://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/documents/downloadPublic?documentIds=080166e5f42211cb&appId=PPGMS
Data: CORDIS, © European Union