‘Words Filled With Tears’: Amorous Discourse as Lamentation in the Palaiologan Romances

Abstract

This chapter examines a particular way in which feelings of love are expressed in the Palaiologan romances (c. 1250–1350). This manner of expression is presented through the systematic use of an imagery and vocabulary of lamentation, that incorporates into these highly artful poetic narratives a discourse deriving from folk poetry. These amorous laments (moirologia), as they are sometimes called by the narrators or even the characters, are not direct quotations of actual folk laments or songs as folklorists in the early twentieth century believed. They are a way of presenting amorous feelings to Byzantine listeners or readers (initially within an aristocratic courtly milieu, later also within a bourgeois environment) in a manner attuned to their contemporary and specific socio-cultural context, yet structurally keeping to the conventions set by the ‘Hellenising’ novels of the Komnenian age. These folk-like songs reflect a new type of poetic and emotional sensibility in late Byzantium, partly in response to Old French romance as it was available in the thirteenth century (orally, at least), partly in response to a growing interest in ‘folk subjects’ as attested by the collections of vernacular proverbs and popular lore.