The project examines Byzantine attitudes to the acquisition of knowledge in Byzantine literary, scientific, and philosophical texts written between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. It analyses late Byzantine notions of curiosity (polypragmosynē), love for learning (philomatheia), and polymathy (polymatheia) and employs them as interpretative keys towards understanding Byzantine concepts of knowledge and the corresponding desire for its acquisition and subsequent promotion and dissemination. In the present project I aim at expanding my doctoral research, first, to the study of Byzantine learned discourses of knowledge throughout the Palaiologan period (1204–1453), as well as during its immediate aftermath. Second, I define a wider and varied selection of sources, and finally, I introduce the notions of curiosity and polymathy as interpretative keys, thus elevating the discussion from the exploration of a single author’s views of knowledge to an examination of the late Byzantine culture’s attitude towards cognition.

A full-length study is available here.