
Julián Bértola
Hannah Seeger Davis Postdoctoral Fellow, 2023-2024 to 2024-2025
- DegreePh.D., Byzantine Studies, Ghent University, 2021DissertationUsing Poetry to Read the Past: Unedited Byzantine Verse Scholia on Historians in the Margins of Medieval ManuscriptsResearch ProjectWriting Poetry to Read the Past: Verses on Historians in the Margins of Byzantine Manuscripts
Julián Bértola studied Classics at the University of Buenos Aires and Byzantine Greek at Dumbarton Oaks. In 2017, he was awarded a fellowship at Ghent University, where he completed his PhD as a member of the Database of Byzantine Book Epigrams project. In 2021, he obtained a Junior Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO).
He is a literary scholar interested in the functions of Byzantine poetry and the material context of its textual transmission. His expertise includes palaeography, codicology and textual criticism. His current project is mainly devoted to writing a monograph on Byzantine verse marginalia in Greek manuscripts of historians.
About the Research Project
Writing Poetry to Read the Past: Verses on Historians in the Margins of Byzantine Manuscripts
This project investigates the literary, material, and ideological aspects of a corpus of marginalia in verse, which has hitherto not been considered as a whole, including edited poems, but also newly discovered texts. It aims to produce a book that studies Byzantine book epigrams and verse scholia in the margins of manuscripts of ancient and medieval historiography in Greek.
The margins of medieval manuscripts of historians are exceptional witnesses of the Byzantine reading methods, which prompted the composition of pieces of literature that investigated the past, interpreted the present and looked into the future. Verse marginalia inform us about the creative process of Byzantine authors and the conditions of circulation of their writings. Special attention is paid to the medieval reception of ancient Greek historians and their impact in defining the complex and ever-changing Byzantine identity.
