Witness Literature in Byzantium

This book analyzes Byzantine examples of witness literature, a genre that focuses on eyewitness accounts written by slaves, prisoners, refugees, and other victims of historical atrocity. It focuses on such episodes in three nonfictional texts John Kaminiates
Capture of Thessaloniki
(904), Eustathios of Thessaloniki s
Capture of Thessaloniki
(1186), and Niketas Choniates
History
(ca. 1204 17) and the three extant twelfth-century Komnenian novels to consider how the authors positions as both eyewitness and victim require an interpretive method that distinguishes witness literature from other kinds of writing about the past. Drawing on theoretical developments in the fields of Holocaust and Genocide Studies (such as Giorgio Agamben s
homo sacer
and Michel Foucault s biopolitics) and comparisons with modern examples (Elie Wiesel s
Night
and Primo Levi s
If This is a Man
),
Witness Literature
emphasizes the affective, subjective, and experiential in medieval Greek historical writing.

1. Bearing Witness in Eustathios of Thessaloniki s
Capture of Thessaloniki
: Holocaust Literature and the Narration of Trauma in Byzantium. - 2. Prison Literature and Slave Narratives in Byzantium: John Kaminiates
Capture of Thessaloniki. -
3. The Carceral Imaginary in Byzantium: The Komnenian Novels as Holocaust Fiction. - 4. The Refugee as Historian: Niketas Choniates and the Capture of Constantinople.