Christian Zgoll

Christian Zgoll (born 1969 in Hof, Bavaria) is a German philologist (specialising in Latin, Greek and Hittite philology) and a co-founder of hylistics, a theory and method of narrative research that has been in development since 2017.

Life

Zgoll studied philosophy, Latin and Catholic religious studies (including Greek and Hebrew) at the Universities of Würzburg and Munich, passing his Staatsexamen in 1997. He earned his doctorate at the University of Munich in 2002 (summa cum laude) with a study of metamorphoses in Latin poetry beyond Ovid’s Metamorphoses ("Phänomenologie der Metamorphose." (Phenomenology of Metamorphosis)). A subsequent DFG-funded research project at Leipzig University on Byzantine Greek epistolary literature (the letters of Kydones) resulted in the monograph Heiligkeit – Ehre – Macht (Holiness – Honour – Power).

From 2005, he held research and teaching positions at Leipzig University, and from 2008 at the University of Göttingen, where he also coordinated the SAPERE edition project at the Göttingen Academy of Sciences (from 2009) and has directed the Collegium Mythologicum research group (since 2010).

Since 2015, he and his wife, Assyriologist Annette Zgoll, have led the DFG-funded research group STRATA (FOR 2064) on the stratification of mythological material, in which they developed the field of hylistics. His habilitation (Göttingen, 2017), published in 2019 as Tractatus mythologicus, became the foundational work for hylistic analysis.

He has been a member of the academic advisory board of the Sammlung Tusculum since 2014. Since 2018, he supports the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of Göttingen through regular seminars on Hittite studies. In 2022, he was appointed an adjunct professor.

He has been married to Annette Zgoll since 1997 (they have three children).

Research

In his 2019 habilitation monograph Tractatus mythologicus, Zgoll developed the foundations of hylistics, a method for analysing myths and other narrative material through hyleme analysis and stratification analysis (see main article: Hylistics). In his work, he understands myths not as texts or images but as medium-independent narrative material that consists of minimal action- or state-bearing units ("hylemes"). The typically layered and reworked structure of such material can be uncovered using stratification analysis.

Zgoll has applied this method in several comparative studies of Greek, Roman, Hittite, and Mesopotamian myths. For his contributions to hylistic mythological research, he received the Peregrinus Prize of the Academy of Sciences and Literature, Mainz, in 2023.

Beyond mythological studies, Zgoll’s research includes a monograph on concepts of sovereignty in Byzantine epistolary literature (2007), studies on Augustan poetry (Ovid, Horace, Tibullus), and a monograph on metamorphoses beyond Ovid (2004). His textbook on Latin metre is widely used (first published in 2012).

In 2025, he published a German edition of the Orphic-Bacchic gold tablets with a reconstruction of initiation rituals into the mysteries of Dionysus.

Selected publications

• Zgoll, Christian. Phänomenologie der Metamorphose: Verwandlungen und Verwandtes in der augusteischen Dichtung [Phenomenology of Metamorphosis: Transformations and Related Phenomena in Augustan Poetry]. Classica Monacensia, vol. 28. Tübingen: Narr, 2004. ISBN 3-8233-6025-6. Also submitted as a doctoral dissertation at the University of Munich in 2002.

• Zgoll, Christian. Heiligkeit – Ehre – Macht: Ein Modell für den Wandel der Herrschaftskonzeption im Spätmittelalter am Beispiel der byzantinischen Kydonesbriefe [Holiness – Honour – Power: A Model for the Transformation of the Concept of Rule in the Late Middle Ages, Using the Byzantine Letters of Kydones as an Example]. Passauer historische Forschungen, vol. 16. Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: Böhlau, 2007. ISBN 978-3-412-20032-9.
• Zgoll, Christian. Römische Prosodie und Metrik: Ein Studienbuch mit Audiodateien [Roman Prosody and Metre: A Textbook with Audio Files]. WBG – Wissen verbindet. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2012. ISBN 978-3-534-23688-6. 2nd revised ed., Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2020. ISBN 978-3-534-26918-1. 3rd revised ed., Norderstedt: Books on Demand, 2025. ISBN 978-3-7693-5839-1.
• Zgoll, Christian. Tractatus mythologicus: Theorie und Methodik zur Erforschung von Mythen als Grundlegung einer allgemeinen, transmedialen und komparatistischen Stoffwissenschaft [Treatise on Mythology: Theory and Methodology for the Study of Myths as the Foundation of a General, Transmedial and Comparative Study of Narrative Material]. Mythological Studies, vol. 1. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019. ISBN 3-11-054119-X. Also submitted as a habilitation thesis at the University of Göttingen in 2017.
• Zgoll, Christian. “Myths as Polymorphous and Polystratic Erzählstoffe”. In Mythische Sphärenwechsel: Methodisch neue Zugänge zu antiken Mythen in Orient und Okzident [Mythical Transitions between Spheres: New Methodological Approaches to Ancient Myths in the Orient and the Occident], edited by Annette Zgoll and Christian Zgoll, 9–82. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110652543-002.
• Zgoll, Christian. Mysterientexte: Die orphisch-bakchischen Goldplättchen. Griechisch – deutsch. Herausgegeben, übersetzt, kommentiert und mit einer Einführung versehen [Mystery Texts: The Orphic-Bacchic Gold Tablets. Greek–German. Edited, Translated and Annotated, with an Introduction]. Sammlung Tusculum. Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2025. ISBN 978-3-11-914878-8. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111709550.

External links

• Personal website at the University of Göttingen
• Publications on academia.edu
• Mythological research at the University of Göttingen
• Living Library of Hylistics

References

Category:1969 births Category:Academic staff of the University of Göttingen Category:German philologists

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