6 - ‘Middle-Class’ Ideology of Education and Language, and the ‘Bookish’ Identity of John Tzetzes

Summary

In our postmodern world of deconstructed texts and textually absorbed contexts, the search for ‘text-based ideals and authorial identities’ has led to essentially two types of approaches to medieval textual products. On the one hand, texts are scrutinised as to the ideologies expressing an overarching worldview of a ruling class, while, on the other, texts are examined as to their intratextual strategies of authorial representation. My aim here is to examine the class ideology and social-ethnic identity of John Tzetzes (c. 1110–70), a well-known teacher of the Komnenian era, who was also a prolific and versatile writer. The case of Tzetzes is interesting for the purposes of the present volume, because he did not aestheticise himself as the object of his discourse in the manner that Michael Psellos did one century earlier, nor did he draw a clearly delineated high-style authorial portrait of himself, as his contemporary Eustathios of Thessaloniki had done. On the contrary, Tzetzes virulently attacked the capital's ‘ethereal rhetors’ (ῥήτορες αἰθέριοι, Hist. 9.659) for creating a false image of themselves by pretending to be learned and educated, while in reality they were ‘thievish, temple-robbing clerics’ (παπάδων … κλεπτῶν ἱεροσύλων, Hist. 9.658). At the same time, Tzetzes presented himself as something else. But what was this ‘something else’ that he projected in many of his writings? It has often been described as his cantankerous and quarrelsome personality, his pedantic approach to the classics, or, more recently, his ‘Roman’ national identity.

The chapter will take as its starting point Tzetzes’ letter collection in order to examine three broader areas of ideology and identity: (1) the approach of Tzetzes to the middle and lower strata of society, partly in relation to his own education and linguistic skills; (2) his understanding of social and ethnic identity in terms of his family lineage and professional lineage; (3) his use of vulgar humour and vituperation as a means of projecting a ‘conservative’ ideology.