Καταλόγια. Στίχοι περί έρωτος αγάπης [Lyrics. Verses on erotic love]

Καταλόγια. Στίχοι περί έρωτος αγάπης  [Lyrics. Verses on erotic love] is an anonymous collection of vernacular love poetry, probably dating from the first half of the 15th century. It is the oldest collection of its kind surviving today, and its only manuscript, which doesn’t save its end, consists of 54 short or longer, narrative or lyric poems (or 715 verses). Realia and linguistic elements of some poems show that their author or anthologist is a Greek-speaking person, of mainly Greek cultural background, though living in a multinational/multicultural, probably western-dominated environment (perhaps in Rhodes during the Knights Hospitaller era).

The collection expresses in various ways the erotic feelings of two youngsters of opposite sexes, their desires and frustrations, sometimes also their ruses or bold acts, as well as the pain caused by love or of deception and abandonment. It almost always praises the beauty or the virtues of the beloved through interesting and, sometimes, original images and figures of speech drawn from nature or the social environment (often the contemporary one). Most of the poems, when not in dialogue form, are uttered by a young man or express a «male voice», and some of them represent specific literary sub-genres: the Alphabet, the «numerical poetry» (the so-called Hecatologa), the love letter (pit(t)akin), and the (usually epigrammatic) distich.

In the book’s Appendix its editor, V. Panagiotopoulou-Doulavera, offers also an extensive anthology of similar texts or excerpts of poems from the 14th to the 17th century.