Abstract
The progymnasmata, or preparatory exercises for rhetoric, were central to the pedagogical system of Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and their posterity was unparalleled: the book devoted to them by the rhetorician Aphthonios in the 4th century was used in various forms in schools throughout Europe until the end of the 18th century. This session attempted to show how these exercises, despite their codified nature, adapted to the cultural changes undergone by the Eastern Roman Empire, and in particular to the most important of these, the development of Christianity.
After presenting and defining the progymnasmata, Mr. Kraus began by underlining the pagan framework of these exercises in the first phase of their history and their intellectual foundation, before following, in a second time, the main, rather slow, stages in the process of Christianization they underwent during the Byzantine era, making more and more room for subjects borrowed from the Bible or hagiography, without however turning them into an instrument of theological polemic. A third part was devoted to the influence these school exercises had on the pedagogy of the first centuries of the modern age, focusing above all on the use of Christian and contemporary subjects in the interdenominational polemics of the Reformation and subsequent periods.
