Elizabeth M. Jeffreys, M.A., B.Litt

Bywater and Sotheby Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language and Literature Emerita, Emerita Fellow of Exeter College.

Elizabeth M. Jeffreys passed away on 12 September 2023.

Research

The question that united Professor Jeffreys' research interests was the nature of the interface between the written and the spoken forms of Greek during the 'Byzantine millennium' (from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries). For most of this time an unofficial censorship did not allow the evolving vernacular to appear in writing, though at intervals the guard slipped. Thus she examined the nature of chronicle writing in the sixth century, court poetry and epic in the twelfth and romances in the fourteenth. Other research interests included editions of a collection of twelfth-century court poetry and of the Oxford version of Digenis Akritis.

Publications

Four Byzantine Novels (Liverpool, 2012)

With M. Jeffreys, Iacobi Monachi Epistulae (Brepols, 2009)

Editor, with J. Haldon and R, Cormack, The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies (Oxford University Press, 2008)

With J. H. Pryor, The Age of the Dromon: the Byzantine navy ca 600-1204 (Brill, 2006)



Editor, Byzantine Style, Civilization and Religion: in honour of Sir Steven Runciman (Cambridge University Press, 2006)



Editor, with M. Jeffreys, Approaches to Texts (.Proceedings of the conference NeoGraeca V, Oxford 2000) (Sub-faculty of Modern Greek, University of Oxford, 2005)



Editor, Rhetoric in Byzantium, SPBS 11 (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2003)



Digenis Akritis: the Grottaferrata and Escorial versions (Cambridge, CUP, 1998)



With M. Papathomopoulos, The War of Troy (O Polemos tis Troados) (Athens, MIET, 1996)