The terminus in Late Byzantine literature and aesthetics

Abstract

In medieval Greek manuscripts, scribes often compared their completion of the transcription of a codex to a ship reaching a harbor. Scholars have noted that this nautical imagery shaped how poets conceptualized their work as authors, but the harbor metaphor also carried over to metaliterary and ekphrastic passages theorizing the affect of images and the built environment. Thus, a technical metaphor born to describe the physical labor of book-making was adapted to elucidate the intellectual labor of book-writing, image-making, and building. The present study discusses the harbor metaphor via the concept of “terminality,” an impulse towards closure that inscribed the content of an object (logos, eikôn) or space (chora) within an experiential horizon. The terminus offers an opportunity to appreciate the often-overlooked importance of the letters themselves (the graphai) in the world before print. The graphê, quite simply, traced the contours of how other media were understood and perceived, providing assurance that literature and art were as well-regulated as the practice of scribal transcription.