A Companion to Byzantine Chronicles, ed. Raimondo Tocci. Brill’s Companions to the Byzantine World, 14. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2025, xii, 575 pp., 3 fig..

Raimondo Tocci, editor of this Companion to Byzantine Chronicles, wisely adopts a broad definition of “chronicle,” acknowledging in his introduction “the fluid boundaries between chronicles and histories” (p. 3). Similarly, in Part I, “Genre,” Athanasios Markopoulos recognizes that “Byzantine historians and chronographers … shared the same perspective … in both their presentation of events and in their explanations of them” (p. 24). R.W. Burgess disagrees, defining “chronicles” so strictly that he insists no Byzantine chronicles were written after the fourth century; but in a reply to Burgess, Roger Scott argues reasonably that since many Byzantines called their works “chronicles,” “it would simply be silly for Byzantinists not to do likewise” (p. 79). In practice, most of the contributors consider as “chronicles” any histories that begin long before living memory, making each chronicle dependent on earlier chronicles. Most contributors also share Scott’s assumption that John Malalas (ca. 490-after 565) “occupies a central position for us” in the development of Byzantine chronography because “[h]is is the earliest surviving example of a Byzantine universal history or chronicle” (p. 83).