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The Reception of the Virgin in Byzantium
This book explores how the Virgin Mary’s life is told in hymns, sermons, icons, art and other media in the Byzantine Empire before AD 1204. A group of international specialists examines material and textual evidence from both Byzantine and Muslim-ruled territories and seeks to explain why Byzantine artisans and writers chose to tell stories about Mary, the Mother of God, in such different ways. Sometimes the variation reflected the theological or narrative purposes of story-tellers; sometimes it expressed their personal spiritual preoccupations. Above all, the variety of aspects that this holy figure assumed in Byzantium reveals her paradoxical theological position as meeting-place and mediator between the divine and created realms. Narrative, whether ‘historical, theological or purely literary, thus played a fundamental role in the development of the Marian cult from late antiquity onward.
THOMAS ARENTZEN is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Faculty of Theology at the University of Oslo and currently a Fellow in Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington, DC. He earned his habilitation in Church History at Lund University in 2018. He has published books and articles in the fields of Marian Studies, Byzantine homiletics and hymnography as well as Eastern Christianity. His publications include The Virgin in Song: Mary and the Poetry of Romanos the Melodist (2017).
MARY B. CUNNINGHAM is Honorary Associate Professor of Historical Theology at the University of Nottingham. She has published books and articles in the fields of Byzantine hagiography, homiletics and theology. Her collection of translations of twelve eighth-century Marian homilies, titled Wider than Heaven: Eighth-Century Homilies on the Mother of God (2008), along with her co-edited book (with Leslie Brubaker), The Cult of the Mother of God in Byzantium: Texts and Images (2011), reflect her ongoing research on Byzantine veneration of the Virgin Mary.
Contributors
THOMAS ARENTZEN is Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oslo and currently a Fellow in Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC. He earned his habilitation in Church History at Lund University in 2018. He has published books and articles in the fields of Marian Studies, Byzantine hymnography and homiletics, as well as Eastern Christianity. His publications include The Virgin in Song: Mary and the Poetry of Romanos the Melodist (2017).
LESLIE BRUBAKER is Professor of Byzantine Art and Director of the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman, and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham. She has published numerous books and articles in the fields of Byzantine art, Gender Studies, and iconoclasm, including (with John Haldon), Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era: A History (Cambridge, 2011).
FR MAXIMOS CONSTAS is the Senior Research Scholar at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology, Brookline, MA, where he teaches Patristic and Byzantine theology. His Marian publications include Proclus of Constantinople and the Cult of the Virgin in Late Antiquity (2003); “Weaving the Body of God: Proclus of Constantinople, the Theotokos, and the Loom of the Flesh, JECS 3 (1995): 169-94; and Mother of the Light: Prayers to the Theotokos by Ephraim Graecus (2018).
MARY B. CUNNINGHAM is Honorary Associate Professor of Historical Theology at the University of Nottingham. She has published books and articles in the fields of Byzantine hagiography, homiletics, and theology. Her collection of translations of twelve eighth-century Marian homilies, Wider than Heaven: Eighth-Century Homilies on the Mother of God (2008), along with her co-edited book (with Leslie Brubaker), The Cult of the Mother of God in Byzantium: Texts and Images (2011), reflect her ongoing research on Byzantine veneration of the Virgin Mary.
FRANCESCA DELL ACQUA, Since 2005, is Assistant Professor of Medieval Art at the University of Salerno, Italy, and holds the Italian habilitation to Associate Professorship (ASN 2012). She has been Marie SktodowskaCurie Research Fellow in the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham, England (2015-17), and is affiliated to the project “Moving Byzantium’ led by Claudia Rapp at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (2017-20). Professor Dell’Acqua has published many articles and books in the fields of early medieval Western and Byzantine art and culture, focusing especially on the relationship between texts and images. Her book, Iconophilia. Religion, Politics, and Sacred Images in Italy c. 680-880, is forthcoming.
MARIA EVANGELATOU is Associate Professor in the Department of History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she teaches courses on ancient Greek, Byzantine and Islamic visual culture. Her research and publications focus on Byzantine illuminated manuscripts and the interrelation of word and image, theology and art, Marian iconography and gender constructs in Byzantine society.
GEORGIA FRANK is Professor of Religion at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. She works on the role of bodies, places and pictures in the ancient Christian imagination between the fourth and sixth centuries. Publications include a monograph, The Memory of the Eyes: Pilgrims to Living Saints in Christian Late Antiquity (2005) and numerous articles on lay piety, pilgrimage and the hymns of Romanos the Melodist.
SUSAN ASHBROOK HARVEY is Willard Prescott and Annie McClelland Smith Professor of History and Religion at Brown University, Rhode Island. She specialises in late antique and Byzantine Christianity, with particular focus on Syriac liturgical poetry. Among her publications are books on the sixth-century bishop, John of Ephesus, and on the ‘olfactory imaginatiom in Early Christian theological and liturgical texts, in addition to several co-edited volumes, including (with David G. Hunter), the Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies (2008) and (with M. Mullett), Knowing Bodies, Passionate Souls: Sense Perceptions in Byzantium (2016).
FR EVGENIOS IVERITES is a member of the brotherhood of Iveron Monastery on Mt Athos. As a layman, he completed his PhD at Princeton University with a dissertation on lay piety in Byzantium during the seventh century and worked as a researcher in the Faculty of Theology at the University of Basel, Switzerland, as co-editor and translator of the fragments of the Ecclesiastical History of Gelasius of Caesarea (2017) and at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology in Brookline, MA.
ELIZABETH JEFFREYS is Emeritus Bywater and Sotheby Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language and Literature at the University of Oxford. Recent books include Four Byzantine Novels (2012) and (with M. Jeffreys), Iacobi Monachi Epistolai (2009). Professor Jeffreys has also edited numerous textbooks and volumes of collected essays in the field of Byzantine Studies.
DEREK KRUEGER, Joe Rosenthal Excellence Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, has published numerous books in the fields of Early Christian and Byzantine Studies. These include Writing and Holiness: The Practice of Authorship in the Early Christian East (2004) and Liturgical Subjects: Christian Ritual, Biblical Narrative, and the Formation of the Self in Byzantium (2014)
ANDREA OLSEN LAM teaches Art History at Pepperdine University’s campus in Washington, DC. She completed her doctorate at the Johns Hopkins University with a thesis titled, “The Genesis and Transformation of the Visitation in Byzantine Art; and is co-editor of The Eloquence of Art: Studies in Honour of Henry Maguire (2019).
MARIA LIDOVA is a post-doctoral Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, and a former member of the research team for the ‘Empires of Faith’ project at the British Museum. She has published articles on imagery associated with the cults of the Virgin Mary and of the saints in late antiquity and early Byzantium.
FR DAMASKINOS OLKINUORA is Lecturer of Systematic Theology and Patristics at the School of Theology of the University of Eastern Finland. He has published his doctoral thesis, Byzantine Hymnography for the Feast of the Entrance of the Theotokos: An Intermedial Approach under his lay name, Jaakko Olkinuora, as well as articles on Byzantine hymnography, homiletics, music and history of liturgy.
EIRINI PANOU studied Art and Archaeology at the National Kapodistrian University of Athens and earned her PhD in Byzantine Studies from the University of Birmingham in 2012. She is currently adjunct faculty at the Open University of Patras and Cyprus. Recent publications include a monograph, The Cult of St Anna in Byzantium (2018).
STEPHEN J. SHOEMAKER is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Oregon, but currently a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute in Cambridge, MA. His recent publications include The Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary’s Dormition and Assumption (2002), The Death of a Prophet: The End of Muhammad's Life and the Beginning of Islam (2011) and The Life of the Virgin Attributed to Maximus the Confessor (2012).
Preface
The majority of chapters in this volume were first presented as papers at the workshop ‘Patristic Theology and Apocryphal Narratives in Byzantine Devotion to Mary the Mother of God’ which Mary Cunningham organised during the seventeenth International Patristics Conference in Oxford (August 2015). Further chapters were commissioned for the volume from scholars who are working in this field but who were unable to attend that workshop. All of the contributors and conversation partners who have commented or discussed this project with us along the way - including Phil Booth, Kosta Simic, Christos Simelidis and Niki Tsironis - deserve our heartfelt thanks. Two anonymous readers also helped us, as editors and individual contributors, to improve the book. Moreover, we have both been fortunate enough to spend time as Fellows at Dumbarton Oaks during the time that we were editing this book.
We should like to take this opportunity to express our gratitude to this excellent research library, along with its Director, Trustees and Senior Fellows for these fruitful periods. We are also very grateful to Michael Sharp and Sophie Taylor, as well as the production team at Cambridge University Press, for their expert advice in the preparation of the volume for publication. Our method in the presentation of proper names - where there exist no standard Anglicised forms - requires some explanation. We have chosen throughout the book to adopt the spellings that we deem to be most familiar to particular groups of readers. Thus the names of figures who belong to the ‘patristic period’ (defined here as occurring before the sixth century) retain the more usual Latinised forms: thus ‘Nestorius, ‘Proclus’ and so on. Names that belong to figures who lived after this period and wrote in Greek follow the current spelling conventions that are used by Byzantinists: that is, they are presented in their Hellenised forms, such as ‘Sophronios, ‘Maximos’ and others.
We realise that this leads to various inconsistencies, but unfortunately this would be true of any system. We use capital letters to indicate major Dominical or Marian feast-days, such as ‘Nativity’ (whether of Christ or the Virgin Mary), ‘Entrance’ and “Dormition: However, when we are talking about the events themselves (whether historical or legendary), we use lower case. Individual contributors have some license to adopt their own conventions, but we have generally tried to achieve consistency in presentation throughout the volume.
Introduction
This fragmentary modernist impression may convey aspects of the Marian image unimagined by a Byzantine viewer or painter. Ekel6f’s captivation by the abyss of blackness might have puzzled a Constantinopolitan writer of ekphrases (rhetorical descriptions), especially since the poem eventually turns the reader’s attention towards the observer. Yet in so doing, precisely, these lines highlight an important point: even in the guise of a static image, the Virgin Mary continues to inspire stories to this very day.
We live ina time of narratives — as has everyone else in history. Byzantium, too, can be described as ‘a large and complex web of intersecting stories which informed the actions and perceptions of its people, even as those same people continuously retold and recast these stories for themselves.’
Stories are inherent to human culture. Storytelling occurs involuntarily in people’s minds and in dreams. ‘Narrative imagining - story — is the fundamental instrument of thought, according to the cognitive scientist Mark Turner.’ If we accept this statement, we also realise that both listening to stories and retelling stories are vital to the way we work as humans. Ekelof cannot look at a picture without starting to make up stories. His is not an epic, but even this little fragment of a poem comes with faltering narration. One can veritably sense how he prises out his own composition from the image — a tale of imagined kisses — as he is polishing forth a silver framing, a metallic veil on the verge of disintegration under the weight of kisses, centuries of kisses, the summoning of love and the ever-present decay on the same mirror, the black surface and the desirous first person plural, into which Ekeléf draws the reader, the encounters with the darkness hidden in the eyes of the Virgin, our lips and Byzantine beauty crumbling.
Stories bring people together. By narrating we make sense of our existence, sort and interpret the massive storm of minutiae that the world would otherwise offer a storiless mind. This explains why religious traditions typically comprise stories, myths and legends; narrative yields understanding or, rather, it befalls as understanding. To tell is to make sense. Storytelling has a contemporaneous function, as a way to grasp life. On the other hand, it has a historical aspect to it, since most stories are new versions of older ones, revised reiterations of past knowledge. By studying historical narratives we can gain insight into how people understood their lives and how sensitivities changed.
Marian Stories
The legacy of the second-century ‘apocryphal’ text known as the Protevangelium of James in Marian storytelling can scarcely be exaggerated; one might almost argue that the history of Marian narratives amounts to a reception of the Protevangelium.’ Throughout the Byzantine era, this work - which primarily tells of Mary’s birth, upbringing and motherhood continued to inspire new narratives about her in various media. This does not mean that all the icon painters and hymn writers necessarily sat down and read the Protevangelium themselves, but versions of it lived on in their culture, and they offered their own tweak or twist to a story that was more or less familiar.
Writing to ascetic women, Athanasius (295-373) could emphasise Mary’s virginity, especially during her formative years, and relate how ‘she did not permit anyone near her body unless it was covered, and she controlled her anger and extinguished the wrath in her inmost thoughts’° Other authors could tell of her parturition and breastfeeding in a cave. An influence from the Protevangelium may arguably be traced in both examples, but the writers addressed devotees with different concerns and worries. Authors and artists drew attention to the Marian aspect that was most relevant to their particular audiences. Hence studies of the Protevangelium and its reception also lead to the following historical questions: which aspects of older stories were privileged or received, and which aspects were left out or censored?
Mary emerged as a part of the Jesus story (not least in the Gospel of Luke) or as a prolegomenon to the same (as in the case of the Protevangelium) during the first Christian centuries. These two texts provided a background story for what culminated at Calvary. Yet they told nothing of what happened to the Virgin Mother later in life. Quite early, people grew interested in her final hours and manner of death, as well as in her state and whereabouts after the Dormition, or her passing away.°
Episodes from Mary’s life were elaborated in iconography and hymnography, often in relation to liturgical celebrations. Many Marian stories and themes first made their appearance alongside emerging feasts of the Virgin, and filled such occasions with narrative content. Whereas the canonical gospels furnished Dominical festivals with literary accounts, commemorations of the Mother of God could not always rely on New Testament sources. The Protevangelium, on the other hand, provided valuable material for artists and composers. By the fifth century the first known Marian feast was celebrated; three centuries later the Nativity of the Theotokos, her Entrance into the Temple, her Conception, the Hypapante (or the Presentation of Christ in the Temple), the Annunciation and the Dormition/Assumption had all entered the festal calendar of the Byzantine church.’ The whole annual cycle was now telling Marian stories. Although the Protevangelium and various accounts of the Dormition and Assumption of the Virgin could offer a narrative framework, most of these festivals required the expansion of earlier stories and the development of motifs.
Much recent Marian scholarship has centred on imagery and cult.’ Such emphasis has rightly challenged the dogmatic focus of earlier scholarship. Was the official recognition of Mary’s role as “Theotokos’ (‘Godbearer’) at the Council of Ephesus (AD 431) the one formative event in the history of Marian history? Attention to relatively early source material has accompanied such questions.° This volume instead takes an interest in the stories about the Virgin: how ecclesiastical or cultural circumstances favoured particular ways to tell her story, and how historical people related their various versions to interpret their own lives. The enquiries bring the volume into the less researched Middle Byzantine period. Many of the studies employ material that has so far attracted little or no scholarly interest; they draw scholarly attention to ‘new and exciting sources in various media.
The book traces changes and fluctuations in the accounts of Mary, from the Early through the Middle Byzantine period.’ During the course of these centuries, Greek authors began to fill the gaps and piece together extensive stories of the Virgin's life from beginning to end. Such Lives of the Virgin have been described as compositions that sit somewhere between hagiography and homiletics."’ As scholars have recently demonstrated, the boundaries between genres in Byzantine literature were porous, such that both structural and rhetorical modes of expression could pass between them.’ It is thus through the vehicle of both poetry and prose that a complete Marian biography (or versions of a biography) evolved in the course of the Middle Byzantine period. Church buildings, such as the one in the Daphni Monastery, conveyed the narrative of Mary’s life in large iconographic sequences. Isolated episodes formerly expanded to fit particular cultic events were now kneaded into a coherent life-story. But much had happened along the way. Narratives concerning the Virgin's birth, infancy, relationship to Jesus during his ministry, passion and resurrection, as well as her death or ‘dormition’ and assumption into heaven had already circulated in extra-canonical literature of the late antique period.'’? Such stories, known from the earliest sources, reappeared in later songs and sermons, as well as in images and amulets." As several chapters in this volume point out, however, Byzantine writers and iconographers assimilated older extracanonical versions in different ways, sometimes accepting this material as ‘historically’ accurate and sometimes interpreting it allegorically. The dynamics of stories’ reception, reuse and recycling justifies the focus on narrative in this book.
What is Narrative?
‘There are many kinds of stories, and these can be defined in various ways. Often narrative is thought of as a particular expression of a given story or event. It may be described as an account of events with a certain chronology. Barbara Herrnstein Smith defines it as ‘someone telling someone else that something happened." The definition works for an oral story, and even for the short Ekelof fragment, but perhaps less well for narrative images. The literary theorist Roland Barthes has suggested a much wider concept of narrative: ‘Among the vehicles of narrative are articulated language, whether oral or written, pictures, still or moving, gestures, and an ordered mixture of all those substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fables, tales, short stories, epics, history, tragedy, drame, comedy, pantomime, paintings ... , stained-glass windows, movies, local news, conversation.
This book adopts a broad concept of narrative, and suggests, following Barthes, that a still picture can be the vehicle for narrative, because it indicates motion or insinuates that something is happening. A picture of the Annunciation does not give a chronological account or a series of events; it stages an episode. The ‘narrative’ is monoscenic and frozen, but it implies action. Moreover, the picture draws on a rich narrative thesaurus from the well-known story that it reiterates. Into the reading of the image go the viewer's own preconceptions of the event, learned perhaps from hearing the Gospel of Luke or the Protevangelium. Thus the narrative is not captured in the image, or restricted to the image as such, but comes about as a reflection of it.!7 The icon that came before Ekeléf in Istanbul sparked narrative glimpses in him and engendered historical musings about the Virgin Mary.
We do not aim to explore the intricacies of narratology in relation to the various media of the Byzantine period,” but rather to study a growing Byzantine urge to tell stories about the Virgin Mary. This urge led her in different directions, in visual, textual and aural media, from the fourth century to the Komnenian period, through the Justinianic era, Iconoclasm and the time of the Macedonian dynasty. The book studies, in other words, the dynamic unfolding of tradition, understood as the continuous creative retelling of received stories.
This Book
Part I, “Telling Visual Stories; turns to material and space in order to highlight that narratives are more than words. The Virgin's story grew out of and came to shape devotional spaces and practices, from the earliest small-scale images to fully developed Marian imagery in the ecclesiastical architecture of the post-Iconoclastic Middle Byzantine period.
Maria Lidova opens the section by tracing early narrative imagery in Late Antiquity and studying how Marian narrative scenes developed. This investigation leads her to question the impact of the Council of Ephesus on visual representations of Mary. She shows that Christian artists in the pre-Ephesine period already took an interest in Mary’s personal story, thus demonstrating that she was a venerable figure in her own right in addition to playing a fundamental role in Christ’s incarnation. The Council did not provoke a change in the way that Mary’s visual story was told, although it may have encouraged the expansion of this form of expression.
Andrea Olsen Lam focuses on small-scale objects and amulets from this early period of visual Marian narrative. Deriving their narrative content from the New Testament texts, these images served several purposes: some were worn prophylactically while others were read for educational reasons. Lam suggests that representations of Mary’s pregnancy, such as the Visitation (or the meeting between Mary and Elizabeth when both women were pregnant, as described in Luke 1:39-45), may have served to charm the wearer into conceiving, carrying and giving birth to a child. In this way the visual evocations of miraculous pregnancy stories were produced in order to engender new stories of new pregnancies.
Eirini Panou examines the reception of the Protevangelium with particular attention to Mary’s childhood and her mother Anna. Panou shows how Middle Byzantine homilies and art used the Protevangelium to interpret in a theological way the relationship between these holy figures. Tension existed between commentators who accepted different versions of the Marian infancy story because these conveyed separate - and sometimes conflicting - messages about her forthcoming role in the incarnation of Christ. The Christological implications of Mary’s narrative continued to be refined during the Iconoclast period; preachers and hymnographers also began to accept more fully the elements that were found only in apocryphal literature.
Maria Evangelatou approaches the intersection of imagery, ritual, poetry and the re-enactment of the sacrifice story in the Christian Eucharist. Building on the suggestive location of Mary’s icon over the altar in church sanctuaries, she shows that both liturgical texts and images render the Theotokos as the provider of Christ’s mystical body and blood. Evangelatou is thus able to conclude from her multimedial survey that ‘Mary’s Eucharistic identity was continuously explored’ in Byzantine sources.
Leslie Brubaker rounds off this section with a ground-breaking study of the eleventh-century monastic church of the Virgin at Daphni, near Athens. This church contains one of the oldest visual representations of Mary’s life in Byzantine monumental art. Brubaker explores the location of the Marian cycle of images, arguing that their arrangement within the church allows ‘visual links’ to occur between the scenes. This contributes to a kind of spatial storytelling, which would have engaged viewers according to their gender since men and women stood separately within the liturgical space. The events depicted in the mosaics thus resonate within the monumental space and interact with each other as well as with their viewers.
Part II turns to festal and Lenten hymnography that was composed in honour of the Virgin Mary throughout the Early and Middle Byzantine periods. It starts with the Constantinopolitan kontakion hymn and its greatest proponent, Romanos the Melode.” Studies of kanon hymnography follow those on the kontakion. The kanon originated in Jerusalem and came to Constantinople as part of the hagiopolite influence.”! By about the end of the ninth century such hymns adorned each day of the liturgical year and came to represent one of the richest surviving sources of Byzantine theological and devotional teaching. The genre has so far not received the scholarly attention that it deserves.”
Thomas Arentzen compares the treatment of the Annunciation story by the eighth-century preacher Germanos I of Constantinople (ca. 650742), with that of the sixth-century hymnographer Romanos the Melode. He demonstrates how the pre-Iconoclastic Annunciation celebrations, as exemplified by these Constantinopolitan writers, privileged dramatic storytelling. Mary appears as someone who is characterised through her own speech. Germanos was clearly influenced by Romanos, but assumed a much more ‘royal’ perception of the Virgin.
Georgia Frank studies how Romanos the Melode worked with Mary’s voice within his songs. Frank not only explores some of the more wellknown kontakia for major feasts, but also engages with the understudied stichera for the Nativity. Looking at how Mary holds her tongue, Frank discovers patterns of speech and silence and analyses the Virgin’s role in the gendered realm of voices. As instances of narrative suspense and theological meditation, the liturgical songs let other voices resound in anticipation of Mary’s own words.
Derek Krueger ventures into the relatively uncharted territory of Byzantine kanon poetry and draws attention to a phenomenon even less studied than the kanons themselves, namely, the theotokia, which are specific Marian verses included at the end of most odes of kanons. He analyses in particular a kanon entitled On the Transgression of Adam. It is composed by a certain Christopher who probably lived in the ninth century. Examining the interaction between the narrative of Adams fall in the kanon and the interspersed theotokia, Krueger points out that the kanon genre interweaves various threads of images and narratives, through which the Marian theotokia run as a separate but central thread. The result, at least in this pre-Lenten kanon, is what Krueger calls ‘an idiosyncratic Mariology.
Fr Damaskinos Olkinuora follows with a chapter on unpublished Byzantine kanon hymns that celebrate the feast of Mary’s Entrance into the Temple. His material includes kanons attributed to the eighth-century Joseph the Hymnographer, but also to otherwise unknown poets. Fr Damaskinos demonstrates that various versions of the story exist side by side in the hymns: webs of cross-references combine to form new, multi-layered narratives, narratives in which the congregation becomes directly involved with the help of ‘musical intertextuality. He proposes, therefore, a multifaceted methodology for studying Byzantine hymnography. Fr Damaskinos concludes that the feast of the Entrance, like that of the Hypapante, offers a symbolic boundary between the old and new covenants. In the case of the former feast, the Virgin Mary mediates the two states of existence, since she is the place - and vehicle - for their meeting and fulfilment.
Part II of the book deals with homiletic texts dating from the earliest Byzantine period to the twelfth century. Homiletic literature exhibits a persistent and uncontested presence throughout Byzantine civilisation.”? Preachers used it to form dogmatic meditations as well as dramatic confrontations. Some were didactic, some encomiastic and some hagiographical.
Stephen Shoemaker shows how diverse Late Antique narratives of Mary can be in their content as he investigates debates about whether she, in fact, was entirely human and whether she actually died. He shows, moreover, that the impulse to write fuller Lives of the Virgin Mary appears relatively early. A Coptic homily attributed to Cyril of Jerusalem, Shoemaker argues, was written in the sixth century and can be counted among the early surviving Lives.
Francesca DellAcqua concentrates more exclusively on Mary’s passing away and the interpretation of her dormition and assumption into heaven. The geographical focus shifts to eighth- and ninth-century Italy. Del’Acqua studies the interaction between homilies and visual art and explores how — at a time when the feast of the Virgin’s Assumption had just been added to Roman liturgical calendar - Mary came to be interpreted as a ‘ladder to heaven.
The emphasis shifts to Greek preaching in Fr Evgenios Iverites’ chapter, which explores the early eighth-century Marian homilies of the towering Byzantine preachers Germanos of Constantinople, Andrew of Crete, and John of Damascus. Their homilies connect her story intimately with doctrinal issues in order to teach Christology. Byzantine preachers expressed the mysterious doctrine of Christ’s incarnation by focusing on his mother’s own conception, birth, upbringing in the temple, death, and assumption. Her holy and ‘God-bearing’ body helped to reveal the Chalcedonian paradox of two natures in one person; the reality of Christ’s participation and ongoing immanence in the created world became more tangible with the help of apocryphal narratives concerning Mary.
James of Kokkinobaphos’ homilies, composed in the twelfth century and currently being edited by Elizabeth Jeffreys, represent a more literary form of homiletic discourse. The series of six homilies provides an encomiastic narrative, beginning with the conception of the Virgin Mary and ending with the annunciation. Jeffreys suggests intriguingly that the presumed recipient or patron of these versions, the sevastokratorissa Eirene,** may have influenced the author's interpretation of his subject. The homilies may have been written for meditative devotion in front of an icon, so that text and image were meant to tell a story together, a story that the devotee might use as a kind of mirror.
The fourth and final Part of the book examines the flourishing of what one may call the full hagiographical Lives of the Virgin that appeared in the Middle Byzantine period. Such texts, which represent a composite genre made up of narrative, panegyric and acclamation, began to be produced in the Greek-speaking world from about the late eighth century onward.” The hagiographical compositions of Epiphanios of Kallistratos and John Geometres provide full-blown narratives of Mary’s legendary biography from conception to death and assumption into heaven. It is possible that such narratives served as liturgical and para-liturgical readings in churches and monasteries throughout the empire.”
As Mary Cunningham shows, the late eighth- and early ninth-century monk Epiphanios of Kallistratos set out to write a full Life of the Theotokos in order to present her as a devotional model for monks and nuns.” He saw himself as a collator and systematiser, and explicitly defined his own work as a reworking of earlier sources. He tried to navigate between what he saw as historical ‘facts’ of Mary’s life and unreliable tales; ironically, however, this led him to renounce much of what was to him received tradition, including more canonical versions. Cunningham concludes that, given the unconventional character of this version, ‘medieval readers accepted - and perhaps even expected - some variation in the narratives.
Fr Maximos Constas studies the important Life of the Virgin by the tenth-century court official and later monk, John Geometres.”* His chapter combines an investigation of the Life with an account of its long delayed critical edition, thus tracing its reception right up to the present day. It involves the analysis of personal correspondence between two renowned Marian scholars, Antoine Wenger and Michel van Esbroeck, and the rediscovery ofa lost manuscript that contains Wenger's critical (but unpublished) edition of the text. Fr Maximos shows that Geometres’ piece is a reworking of earlier Lives, including the one by Epiphanios, but that it nonetheless amounts to a highly original work. Constas and Christos Simelidis are currently preparing a critical edition of Geometres’ Life.
Human beings tell stories in order to make sense of their surroundings and belief systems. The Mother of God represented for Byzantine Christians the grounding of transcendent reality in the physical world of historical time - that is, the world of narrative. This book explores various forms of narrative, both textual and visual, which were elaborated in original and sometimes surprising - ways in the course of the Early and Middle Byzantine periods. They reflect not only an ongoing theological interest in Marty, as ‘Birth-giver’ and Mother of God, but also a human and emotional concern with her qualities as a human being. This holy figure fulfilled many roles in Byzantine society, including those of human guarantor of Christ’s incarnation, intercessor and defender of orthodox Christians. However, she also remained a person to whom individuals, both men and women, could appeal for help and healing. As Dame Averil Cameron has memorably remarked, the ‘extraordinary capaciousness’ of the Theotokos makes her a person who may ‘be all things to people at different times and places.” We hope that the present book demonstrates the creative potential of narrative - whether textual, aural or visual - in shaping the ever-changing Byzantine views of Mary, as virginal birth-giver and extraordinary nurse, holy container and eucharistic provider, empress and ascetic, faithful disciple, warrior and ladder, intercessor and heavenly mother.
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