ABSTRACT
During the last centuries of Byzantium, as in earlier periods when the romance had flourished, there existed no generic term specific to this kind of writing. From a historical perspective it is easy enough to identify a body of texts of the period which tell fictional tales of love and adventure and betray some generic affiliation with the twelfth-century love romances or the chivalric romances of the West, or in some degree with both. The contemporary term for such writing, which derives from the rhetorical exercises of the progymnasmata that were still being produced in the fourteenth century, is diegesis (διήγησις) or, less commonly, diegema διήγημα, tale). But this term is applied to almost all narrative in the vernacular, and in the final chapter we shall be looking at some forms of narrative which reveal the influence of the contemporary romance without, in our own terms, being truly classifiable as romances. To what extent writers and readers, or audiences, were aware of the generic distinction we cannot be certain. There is, as we shall see, an impressive degree of cohesion among the romances of love and adventure, both thematically and stylistically, which suggests an implicit awareness of a common genre. But it may be that the writers of our period had a more open-ended concept of the genre in which they were working than is assumed here. Similarly, in the West the term roman at first meant ‘anything written in a Latin-based [Romance] vernacular’, and only gradually became a generic term. 1
