Welcome to the Byzantine Medieval
Hypertexts website!!!
Yes, the idea of
hypertexts from the Middle Ages sounds absurd. We think of the
Middle Ages as a time of rampant illiteracy
and premature death. We remember
stories of monks meticulously
scribing away in Latin
to
preserve the
heritage of Western civilization against the onslaught of
the barbarian hoards, but we tend to forget that the Renaissance
was conceived and
transmitted to the West through Byzantine monks meticulously
scribing away in Greek
and Slavic scripts under far greater pressure from the Eastern
invasion.
The information on this website presents the theory of hypertext
and its medieval application in Byzantine manuscripts, using examples
from the Theodore Psalter, a manuscript created in 1066 in the Stoudious
monastery near Constantinople. Hypertextuality in this case manifests
as a complex interaction between the text and the illustrations in
the manuscript and the text as it relates to other manuscripts and
its historical context.
This website was
created by Tatiana Nikolova-Houston, doctoral student in the School
of Information at the University of Texas at Austin, in partial
satisfaction of the requirements for TLC
331, Medieval
Hypertexts, Spring semester
2003.
