The present volume is a Festschrift in honor of the distinguished scholar in Late Byzantine, post-Byzantine and Cretan Renaissance studies I. Mavromatis. The title Kalligraphos is indicative of the foundations of his scholarship, which lie in the fields of paleography and early printing. With manuscripts and early printed books as the primary material of his studies, Professor Mavromatis has produced several major works in the fields of Byzantine philology, Cretan Renaissance literature (especially Erotorcritos) and late Byzantine vernacular poetry. This volume includes a short preface and twenty-four articles by senior and younger scholars, former colleagues, collaborators, and students of Professor Mavromatis. The articles are loosely arranged in chronological order of their subject matter and treat issues ranging from Byzantine historiography going back to the 4th century CE to post-Byzantine Cretan poetry of the 17th century. This philological kaleidoscope features new editions and interpretations of hitherto unknown or little-known poems and texts. The volume is intended for scholars, graduate and undergraduate students and the general readership interested in Byzantine and post-Byzantine literature.

Animal Fables of the Courtly Mediterranean is a treasure trove of stories and lessons on how to conduct oneself and succeed in life, sometimes through cleverness rather than virtue. They feature human and many animal protagonists, including the two jackals Stephanites and Ichnelates, after whom the book is named, as well as several lion kings. At the heart of this work are tales from the Sanskrit Panchatantra and Mahabharata, to which more were added, both in the original Middle Persian collection and its eighth-century Arabic translation, the widely known Kalila wa-Dimna. In the eleventh century, readers in Constantinople were introduced to these stories through an abbreviated Greek version, translated by Symeon Seth from the Arabic. The new Byzantine Greek text and English translation presented here is a more complete version, originating in twelfth-century Sicily and connected with Admiral Eugenius of Palermo. It contains unique prefaces and reinstates the prologues and stories omitted by Seth.

Often simply called the Holy Mountain, Mount Athos was the most famous center of Byzantine monasticism and remains the spiritual heart of the Orthodox Church today. This volume presents the Lives of Euthymios the Younger, Athanasios of Athos, Maximos the Hutburner, Niphon of Athos, and Philotheos. These five holy men lived on Mount Athos at different times from its early years as a monastic locale in the ninth century to the last decades of the Byzantine period in the early fifteenth century. All five were celebrated for asceticism, clairvoyance, and, in most cases, the ability to perform miracles; Euthymios and Athanasios were also famed as founders of monasteries. Holy Men of Mount Athos illuminates both the history and the varieties of monastic practice on Athos, individually by hermits as well as communally in large monasteries. The Lives also demonstrate the diversity of hagiographic composition and provide important glimpses of Byzantine social and political history. All the Lives in this volume are presented for the first time in English translation, together with authoritative editions of their Greek texts.