Abstract EN:

Despite a nearly total absence of references to christianity, twelfth-century byzantine romances are very much a product of their age. Though they are undeniably influenced by greek romances of the imperial age in their choice of themes such as love, adventure and the gods of mount olympus, one can nonetheless detect in them, through a glass darkly, links to the political realities, culture and society of their time. It shows up in the corpus of literary references, of peculiarities of language and use of a heavy rhetorical machinery ; in the importance given to pathos, virginity, family and birth ; the presentation of court ceremonial, military tactics and strategy, even in the pagan taste for the arts of divination. But the fact that open references to time and location are absent would seem revelatory of the writers' desire for escapism, a flight from too oppressive a concrete reality, taking refuge in an imaginary world. The simplified structure of the romances compared to greek ones, a result of their single plot, makes them closer to our conception of the novel. Were these medieval romances - which also borrow from byzantine hagiography and epic - influenced in any way by the western-european ones, contemporary with them ? despite various theories that have been put forward, the text gives only tiny, very superficial signs of such an influence, if any. But especially for e of the romances, one could find parallels in arabic literature, in view of the heroine's provocative behaviour. As for later imitators, they seem to be non-existent. Twelfth-century byzantine romances give way by the fourteenth to courtly romances on clearly western lines, which have nothing specifically byzantine left in them.