Value judgments

I was rather taken by this summing-up of Warren Treadgold's review of A Companion to Byzantium (ed. Liz James), at The Medieval Review:

...After a period of decades when "value judgments" were often discarded out of hand, some scholars are again ready to say that some Byzantine art is poorly executed, although few seem to be equally comfortable with saying that some Byzantine literature is poorly written.  While this expansion of the discussion is good for art history, the absence of such an expansion is bad for literary history.
Serious literary criticism is impossible if we cannot consider whether Byzantine authors succeeded in what they set out to do, or whether what they set out to do was worth doing (at least for some purpose besides advancing themselves by vapid praise of the emperor), or whether even they believed that what they were doing was an inferior form of literature (as was the case for most works in "popular" Greek, including hagiography).  This point is obviously related to the question of historical decline: we need to entertain the possibility that in some periods the level of artistic or literary achievement was higher or lower than in others, just as in some periods the level of economic prosperity or military or administrative efficiency was higher or lower than in others.  Even if such conclusions remain controversial, they are apparently becoming harder to dismiss as "outdated" without reflection or discussion.

Share this

My Website