Byzantine Hermogenes or ByzHerm is a platform aggregating all the projects revolving around the exegetical tradition of the Corpus Hermogenianum funded at SDU. It is designed to inform about the projects' activities but also to provide tools and resources for whoever is interested in studying the reception of this Greco-Roman bestseller.
Moving in the footsteps of Hermogenes, we practice what we preach and our commitment to open science is militant: on this platform we make available all our projects' proposals and final reports (click on the projects' titles below) but also OA transcriptions, bibliographies, our data and models, all to be found under Resources. Hermogenes started a capacious tradition, one that needs a joint effort to be understood in full, we are therefore more than willing to partner up with other projects. For any question, curiosity or contribution to this website, do not hesitate to reach out. In the meantime happy surfing!
Research funded by the Velux Foundation
Research funded by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung
Research funded by
The Carlsberg Foundation
Research funded by
The Carlsberg Foundation
Method. A Digital Entangled Approach to European Intellectual History
This project argues that the Renaissance concept of method was not solely a Western European invention but emerged through a long process of intellectual exchange with the Byzantine world. Drawing on an entangled-history approach, it investigates how Greek rhetorical, pedagogical, and hermeneutic traditions shaped early modern theories of knowledge organization and transmission.
A central role is played by Hermogenes, whose rhetorical handbook became a major bridge between Byzantium and Renaissance Europe. Although usually regarded as a classical rhetorical authority, Hermogenes reached the West together with a vast Byzantine exegetical tradition. Over centuries, Byzantine commentators developed sophisticated reflections on methodos as a tool for organizing discourse, knowledge, teaching, and interpretation. These commentaries were transmitted through manuscripts, marginalia, educational materials, and early printed editions, accompanying the Hermogenian corpus into Western intellectual circles.
The project therefore shifts attention from Hermogenes himself to the Byzantine commentators on Hermogenes, arguing that they functioned as key cultural mediators. Their interpretations blended Aristotelian logic, rhetorical theory, and pedagogical practice, creating conceptual frameworks that may have influenced figures such as Philip Melanchthon, Johannes Sturm, and Pierre de la Ramée.
By combining manuscript studies, network analysis, and machine learning, Method seeks to trace these intellectual connections and test whether Renaissance “method” was shaped by Byzantine understandings of rhetoric and learning. In doing so, it challenges the idea of an unmediated recovery of antiquity and highlights the crucial contribution of Byzantine commentators and scholars to the formation of European educational and intellectual culture. Read the full proposal here.
E-Rhetoric. A Handwritten Text Recognition Infrastructure for Medieval Greek
Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) – i.e. the conversion of handwritten text into digital text through machine learning and pattern recognition techniques – performed on historical texts has improved, accelerated and even revolutionized our ways to understand of the past. While successfully applied to Latin characters for at least a decade, this methodology is still in its infancy – albeit rapidly booming – for texts written in other alphabets, including Greek. And yet, this is where it can be most beneficial, due to a) the amount of un- or poorly edited pre-modern texts and b) the potential to facilitate engagement with palaeographically challenging documents. E-Rhetoric aims to harness the potential of HTR on Greek Byzantine manuscripts to create a corpus in support of the Semper Ardens Accelerate project “A Rhetoric for the Empire”. By targeting informal scholarly Byzantine Greek handwriting from the 13th and the 14th centuries, the infrastructure will lead to: 1. a digital corpus based on a new HTR model and allowing quantitative analysis; 2. an open digital edition of previously non-accessible sources. Read the full proposal here.
A Rhetoric for the Empire: Education, Politics, and Speech-Making in the Byzantine Millennium
Rhetoric and politics, rhetoric and ethics, rhetoric, and truth: since ancient Greece the difficult relationship between these concepts has kept many a thinker busy. Including the Byzantine. “A rhetoric for the empire” explores how the Greek Middle Ages (527-1453) creatively navigated these notions by engaging with the corpus of rhetorical treatises bequeathed under the name of Hermogenes (2nd-3rd century CE). Byzantine attitudes toward the art of discourse seem to be marked by contradiction. Public life was shaped by rhetorical performance, and yet in the wake of the Church Fathers prescriptive texts warned against the dangers of unbridled rhetoric. The young elites of an Empire whose territory at times exceeded Alexander’s conquests were trained to perform Demosthenes’ words of civic liberty. Intellectuals living in a Christian theocracy soon resumed the old Greek democratic notion of politikos logos (political discourse). Rhetoric belonged into the lesser liberal arts of the trivium (Grammar, Logic. Rhetoric), yet its theorists used Arithmetic, Geometry and Music, the superior arts of the quadrivium (together with Astronomy), to explain its power. Looking at the Byzantine reception of Hermogenes helps make sense of these apparent contradictions. Read the full proposal here. CE).
Necessity by Design: The Mathematics of Rhetoric in Middle Byzantine Culture
The project explores the conceptual and visual links between mathematical/geometrical reasoning and rhetoric in the middle Byzantine period (843-1204). It looks at how graphic and discursive practices associated to mathematics and geometry contributed to reinforce the epistemic status of rhetoric among the elites of the empire. It contributes to pre-modern intellectual history and complements recent developments in ancient and early modern history of mathematics by providing access to new manuscript material (texts, diagrams, graphs) from a historical period and a geographical area usually disregarded in these fields of enquiry. Read our final report here.
“Further, because the rhetor is not alone in having what is persuasive, but also both medicine and geometry have it, for even the demonstrations ought not to be presented in a non persuasive way but must be persuasive.”
Rhetorica anonyma, 11th c. (?), vol. 14, p. 31 Rabe
NeccessitybyDesign