This chapter proposes an assessment of the biblical figure of David as presented by Theodore Prodromos in some of his Historical Poems. David was often considered in Byzantine culture as the first and most important example of a Christian poet. The poet of the Psalms is depicted by Prodromos both as a source of inspiration for the persona loquens and as a role model for the emperor. This twofold representation is crucial to shed light on some of the poetic strategies used by Prodromos when dealing with Psalmic material in poems addressed to emperors. The chapter includes a close-reading of Prodromos’ Historical Poem 17, where a military victory of John II Komnenos is celebrated. In this long text, Prodromos systematically borrows verses from the text of the Psalms and adapts them in order to fit the occasional character of the poem. The analysis of the biblical hypotext as a literary source presented in the chapter provides new insight into the role that the biblical heritage could play within Byzantine authors’ canonical reference system.

“Reading: John Dryden’s Postsecular Apostolic and the Time of Literary History” analyzes John Dryden’s writings of the 1680s, tracking his move (his literary conversion if you will) from allegory and allegoresis to new concepts of literary history and literary hermeneutics that demand new reading practices. It analyzes Dryden’s mid-career allegories as investigations into how conservative theories of temporality, figured here as the possibility of understanding across time, produce theories of literature and theories of reading that are oriented toward the future but that are necessarily grounded in the past and in material bodies. This chapter argues that Dryden’s writings from the 1680s secularize a ritualized, affective, transformative, and Catholic reading practice. It speculates that a literary conservatism – literary temporality as communion and literary interpretation as committed to a hermeneutics of immanence – constitutes a conservatively based idea of reading that resonates once again in the twenty-first century critical turn to post-critical and post-nationalistic methods.