Alberto Ravani
Mary Seeger O'Boyle Postdoctoral Fellow, 2024-2025
- DegreePh.D., Medieval and Modern Languages (Byzantine and Modern Greek), University of Oxford, 2024DissertationJohn Tzetzes’ Allegories of the Iliad: Introduction and Partial EditionResearch ProjectThe Homeric Allegories by John Tzetzes. Twelfth-Century Constantinople through the Homeric Glass
Alberto Ravani is a literary scholar working on Byzantine poetry from the 12th to the 14th century; in particular, he focuses on allegory, the reception of Trojan matter in Byzantium and manuscript studies. He studied Literature and Classics at the University of Bologna (BA) and then classical and medieval philology at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (MA) and Hamburg (Erasmus+). In 2024 Alberto obtained his doctorate in Modern Languages (Byzantine and Modern Greek) from the University of Oxford. After Oxford, he worked nine months at the Institute of Medieval Research (Department of Byzantine research) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences with an Ernst Mach fellowship.
About the Research Project
The Homeric Allegories by John Tzetzes. Twelfth-Century Constantinople through the Homeric Glass
Alberto is currently writing a monograph on the Homeric Allegories, a 10,000-line poem written in twelfth-century Constantinople by the writer and scholar John Tzetzes. Initially commissioned by the Byzantine empress Irene-Bertha of Sulzbach, wife of Manuel I, the poem was later completed for the aristocrat Konstantinos Kotertzes. Tzetzes wrote the Allegories in two different phases across several decades of his life. The Allegories are the last work Tzetzes dedicated to the Trojan Matter and contain the explanation and allegorical commentary of both the Iliad and the Odyssey. It is a testimony of Tzetzes’ reading and understanding of the poem. The above-mentioned book investigates the manuscript tradition, the context and the poem itself providing the reader with tools to navigate Tzetzes’ text.