The Poverty of Écriture and the Craft of Writing

It is the purpose of this paper to challenge some traditional assumptions about authorship and style in twelfth-century Byzantium, and to present a new, if tentative, interpretation of the fourth Prodromic Poem, which may have important implications for an understanding of literary perceptions of every-day life in twelfth-century Constantinople, as well as for the ways in which texts can be read.