The Tale of Livistros and Rodamne: A Byzantine Love Romance of the 13th Century

This volume offers the first fully scholarly translation into English of the Tale of Livistros and Rodamne, a love romance written around the middle of 13th century at the imperial court of Nicaea, at the time when Constantinople was still under Latin
dominion. With its approximately 4700 verses, Livistros and Rodamne is the longest and the most artfully composed of the eight surviving Byzantine love romances. It was almost certainly written to be recited in front of an aristocratic audience by an educated poet experienced in the Greek tradition of erotic fiction, yet at the same time knowledgeable of the Medieval French and Persian romances of love and adventure. The poet has created a very ’modern’ narrative filled with attractive
episodes, including the only scene of demonic incantation in Byzantine fiction.
The language of the romance is of a high poetic quality, challenging the
translator at every step. Finally, Livistros and Rodamne is the only Byzantine romance that consistently constructs the Latin world of chivalry as an exotic setting, a type of occidentalism aiming to tame and to incorporate the Frankish Other
in the social norms of the Byzantine Self after the Fall of Constantinople to the Latins in 1204.

Panagiotis A. Agapitos is Professor of Byzantine Literature at the University of Cyprus. His previous publications include The Tale of Livistros and Rodamne: Critical edition of Redaction alpha (Athens 2006) and Medieval Narratives between History and Fiction: From the Center to the Periphery of
Europe, c. 1100-1400 (edited with L. B. Mortensen, Copenhagen 2012).