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The Historia Rhōmaikē was written and circulated in Constantinople in several installments since the 1340s. It recounts events in Byzantine history from the period from 1204 until ca. 1359. Today the work is preserved in more than forty manuscripts, two of which-Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, codd. Vat. gr. 165 and 164-were partially copied, annotated, and revised by Gregoras himself. The pinakes, marginal, and chapter titles in both codices indicate that the latter were designed as an edition of the first seventeen books of the History. The present paper studies Gregoras’ historiographical project and a selection of his letters and hagiographical works in order to explore Gregoras’ self-referential remarks on ‘novelty’ and ‘innovation’, as well as his reflections on the aesthetic value of variety and the pleasure the latter can incite. It also adduces as evidence some of the ‘editorial’ decisions the two Vatican manuscripts preserving the Roman History display, such as the chapter division and its relationship to the pinax of each volume, and the role of marginal titles in guiding the readers’ emotional response or alternatively, in directing how the text should be performed. Gregoras’ remarks on novelty and its relation to diversity and perception indicate his concern with the reception of his literary production, which in turn, reaffirms the importance of rhetoric in Palaiologan Byzantium.

This eighth issue of Interfaces contains two thematic clusters: the first cluster, entitled The Astronomical Imagination in Literature through the Ages, is edited by Dale Kedwards; the second cluster, entitled Medieval Authorship and Canonicity in the Digital Age, is edited by Jeroen De Gussem and Jeroen Deploige.

This article is about the interplay between diagrammatic representation, the mediation of mirrors, and visual cognition. It centres on Demetrios Triklinios (fl. ca. 1308–25/30) and his treatise on lunar theory. The latter includes, first, a discussion of the lunar phases and of the Moon's position in relation to the Sun, and second, a narrative and a pictorial description of the lunar surface. Demetrios Triklinios's Selenography is little-known (though edited in 1967 by Wasserstein) and not available in translation into a modern scholarly language. Therefore, one of the main goals of the present article is to introduce its context and contents and to lay down the foundations for their detailed study at a later stage. When discussing the Selenography, I refer to a bricolage consisting of the two earliest versions of the work preserved in Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, graecus 482, ff. 92r–95v (third quarter of the fourteenth century) and Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, graecus 2381, ff. 78r–79v (last quarter of the fourteenth century). I survey the available evidence concerning the role of Demetrios Triklinios (the author), John Astrapas (?) (the grapheus or scribe-painter), and Neophytos Prodromenos and Anonymus (the scribes-editors) in the production of the two manuscript copies. Next, I discuss the diagrams included in the Selenography and their functioning in relation to Triklinios's theory concerning the Moon as a mirror reflecting the geography of the Earth, on the one hand, and to the mirror experiment described by Triklinios, on the other. Finally, I demonstrate how, even though the Selenography is a work on lunar astronomy, it can also be read as a discussion focusing on the Mediterranean world and aiming at elevating its centrality and importance on a cosmic scale.

The article focuses on communities living along the Gorna Strouma river, in Bulgaria, during the 15th and 17th centuries. The author of the article notes the overpopulation of the area, the ideal climate for agriculture and farming, and the importance of steel production. Inhabitants living close to the Strouma river were living off the land, and the water from the river, and the list of different jobs given cites blacksmiths, potters, shepherds and guides, as main professions. Finally, the author states that the religion observed in the area was predominantly Christianity.