Echoes of Greek in Early Medieval Europe: From Alphabetic Symbolism to Liutprand of Cremona’s Antapodosis

This study examines the survival and circulation of Greek in Early Medieval Western Europe through the lens of Liutprand of Cremona’s Antapodosis, a work that features unusually intimate Greek insertions, offering a unique glimpse into linguistic contact in the 10th century. A close syntactic examination of these passages reveals a form of Greek competence shaped more by lived, spoken interaction than by formal education. Liutprand handles dialogue with confidence, deploying familiar conversational patterns and uncomplicated main clauses with evident assurance, but he falters whenever subordination and more intricate morphosyntactic structures are required. The resulting Greek is neither fully learned nor entirely naïve: it bears the unmistakable imprint of Byzantine orality, tempered by a partial and unstable literacy. In this way, the Antapodosis emerges as a rare and vivid testimony to Greek as it was heard and imperfectly mastered in the Latin West of the early Middle Ages.