Download PDF | Managing Emotion In Byzantium Passions, Affects And Imaginings Taylor & Francis ( 2022)
471 Pages
Byzantinists entered the study of emotion with Henry Maguire’s groundbreaking article on sorrow, published in 1977. Since then, classicists and western medievalists have developed new ways of understanding how emotional communities work and where the ancients’ concepts of emotion differ from our own, and Byzantinists have begun to consider emotions other than sorrow. It is time to look at what is distinctive about Byzantine emotion.
This volume is the first to look at the constellation of Byzantine emotions. Originating at an international colloquium at Dumbarton Oaks, these papers address issues such as power, gender, rhetoric, or asceticism in Byzantine society through the lens of a single emotion or cluster of emotions. Contributors focus not only on the construction of emotions with respect to perception and cognition but also explore how emotions were communicated and exchanged across broad (multi)linguistic, political and social boundaries. Priorities are twofold: to arrive at an understanding of what the Byzantines thought of as emotions and to comprehend how theory shaped their appraisal of reality.
Managing Emotion in Byzantium will appeal to researchers and students alike interested in Byzantine perceptions of emotion, Byzantine culture and medieval perceptions of emotion.
Margaret Mullett is Honorary Professor in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh, and former Director of Byzantine Studies, Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC.
Susan Ashbrook Harvey is Willard Prescott and Annie McClelland Smith Professor of History and Religion at Brown University.
Contributors
Floris Bernard is currently Assistant Professor of Ancient and Medieval Greek at Ghent University. Previously he taught at Central European University in Budapest. He has worked on Byzantine poetry and epistolography, with a focus on education, humour, emotion and competition. He has published a book on the sociological contexts of eleventh-century poetry (2014), and, together with Chris Livanos, he has produced in the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library series (2018) the first English translation of John Mauropous’s and Christopher Mitylenaios’s poems. He has also assisted in setting up a database on Byzantine book epigrams.
Annemarie Weyl Carr is Professor Emerita of Art History at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, and Vice President of the Board of the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute in Nicosia. She has published on Byzantine and post-Byzantine painting; on art and issues of cultural interchange in the eastern Mediterranean Levant, above all on Cyprus, and on medieval women artists. Recent books include Asinou Across Time: The Church and Frescoes of the Panagia Phorbiotissa, Cyprus, edited with Andreas Nicolaides (2012) and Famagusta: Art and Architecture (2014). She is currently working on the cave church of St Marina in Qalamoun, Lebanon, and on a book on the icon of the Mother of God at Kykkos Monastery in Cyprus. She received the College Art Association’s 2006 Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Andrew Crislip is Professor of History and Blake Chair in the History of Christianity at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. He is author of numerous articles and books, including Selected Discourses of Shenoute the Great: Community, Theology, and Social Conflict in Late Antique Egypt (with David Brakke, 2015), Thorns in the Flesh: Illness and Sanctity in Late Ancient Christianity (2013), and From Monastery to Hospital: Christian Monasticism and the Transformation of Health Care in Late Antiquity (2005). His current research interests include the writings and career of Shenoute, early Christianity and ancient medicine, and the history of emotions in late antiquity.
Maria Doerfler is Assistant Professor of Eastern Christianity in Yale University’s Department of Religious Studies. Her work focuses on the interpretation of authoritative texts, law, philosophical writings and scripture in the second to sixth centuries CE, with particular emphasis on how contexts of personal or communal crisis shape exegesis. She is author of Jephthah’s Daughter, Sarah’s Son: The Death of Children in Late Antiquity (2020), editor of The Early Church and State (2016), and co-editor of Syriac Encounters: Papers from the Sixth North American Syriac Symposium (2015). She holds a PhD in Early Christianity from Duke University, a JD from UCLA, and a BA in political science from Princeton University.
Georgia Frank is Charles A. Dana Professor of Religion at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. She is author of The Memory of the Eyes: Pilgrims to Living Saints in Christian Late Antiquity (2000) and co-editor with S.R. Holman and A.S. Jacobs of The Garb of Being: Embodiment and the Pursuit of Holiness in Late Ancient Christianity (2020). She has also published articles on lay Christian emotions, baptism and works by the sixth-century hymnographer Romanos the Melodist.
Susan Ashbrook Harvey is Willard Prescott and Annie McClelland Smith Professor of Religion and History at Brown University, where she has also served as Royce Professor of Teaching Excellence and Director of the Program in Early Cultures. She specialises in Christianity of the Syriac and Byzantine traditions, and has published widely in academic venues on women in ancient Christianity, asceticism, the cult of saints, hagiography, hymnography and religion and the senses. Her current research focuses on women’s religious singing, and the poetry of Jacob of Serugh. Among other works, she is co-editor with Margaret Mullett of Knowing Bodies, Passionate Souls: Sense Perceptions in Byzantium (2017) and author of Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination (2006).
Martin Hinterberger teaches Byzantine Literature at the University of Cyprus. His major research interests are emotions in Byzantine literature and society (particularly envy, jealousy, arrogance and shame), metaphraseis, Byzantine hagiographical literature, (auto)biography, and the history of medieval Greek, especially as a literary language, as well as the edition of Byzantine texts. Among his publications are Autobiographische Traditionen in Byzanz (1999), Phthonos: Mifgunst, Neid und Eifersucht in der byzantinischen Literatur (2013), the edited volumes The Language of Learned Byzantine Literature (2014) and (in collaboration with Anne Alwis and Elisabeth Schiffer) Metaphrasis in Byzantine Literature (2021). In collaboration with John Davis, he is currently preparing the edition of the Metaphrasis of Niketas Choniates’ History.
Sergey A. Ivanov is Professor of Byzantine Studies and Chair of Ancient and Byzantine History at the National Research University ‘Higher School of Economics’ in Moscow. He has authored more than 200 scholarly publications, including the monographs Pearls Before Swine: Missionary Work in Byzantium (2015) and Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond (2006). His sphere of interest includes the cultural history of Byzantium and Byzantine influence on the Slavs. He has published numerous previously unknown Byzantine hagiographic texts, both Greek ones and those that survived only in Church Slavonic translations. His most important articles are assembled in the collection entitled Vizaniiskaia kul’tura i agiografiia [Byzantine Culture and Hagiography] (2020). In 2021 he was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.
Derek Krueger is Joe Rosenthal Excellence Professor of Religious Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is author of Symeon the Holy Fool: Leontius’s Life and the Late Antique City (1996), 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). Current projects include a history of a Byzantine hymnal known as the kontakarion; and a book exploring how the culture of monasticism in Byzantium produced ideas about masculinity, gender, sexuality and friendship. He has served as President of the Byzantine Studies Association of North America and Chair of the United States National Committee for Byzantine Studies. He recently completed two terms as Senior Fellow in Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks.
Henry Maguire is Emeritus Professor of the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University. He has also taught at Harvard and at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. From 1991 to 1996 he served as Director of Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC. He has authored six books on Byzantine art, and co-authored three more with Eunice Dauterman Maguire. Together with Ann Terry, he carried out a survey and publication of the wall mosaics in the cathedral of Eufrasius at Poreé, which was published in 2007. Throughout his career he has been interested in the relationships between art and literature in Byzantium, although he has also written on other topics, including ivories, floor and wall mosaics, Byzantine secular art, magic and attitudes toward nature in Byzantium.
Margaret Mullett is Professor of Byzantine Studies Emerita at Queen’s University Belfast and Director of Byzantine Studies Emerita at Dumbarton Oaks. She works on the borderlines of history and literature, starting with letter-writing, literacy, rhetoric, performance, and proceeding to genre, patronage and narratology in prose and verse; she addresses issues of identity, gender, relations and networks, as well as emotions, senses and dream. She is now working on tents and on the Christos Paschon. She directed the British Academy’s Evergetis Project and the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Centre for Byzantine Cultural History in collaboration with the universities of Newcastle and Sussex. She has held visiting professorships at Vienna and Uppsala and is now an Honorary Professor at the University of Edinburgh.
Aglae Pizzone is a Byzantinist with a training in classics. In her research, she focuses on cultural history and the history of ideas. She is currently Assistant Professor in Medieval Literature at the Danish Institute for Advanced Study, hosted by the University of Southern Denmark. She is currently interested in autography and self-commentaries in the Greek middle ages. She has recently discovered new autograph notes by John Tzetzes in the Voss. Gr. Q1. Recent publications include ‘Selfauthorization and strategies of autography in John Tzetzes’, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies, 60 (2020), 652-90.
Niki J. Tsironis is a Byzantine historian working at the Institute of Historical Research of the National Hellenic Research Foundation. She is an Associate in Byzantine Studies at the Centre for Hellenic Studies of Harvard University (since 2013) and Adjunct Professor of Byzantine Studies at the Stavros Niarchos Center for Hellenic Studies of Simon Fraser University, Vancouver (since 2017). She is also a founding member of AINOS Cultural Society. Her research interests concern aspects of Byzantine cultural history. She has written on the emotions and the senses, literature and performance, the Mother of God, and the history of books in the Byzantine and post-Byzantine periods. She curated the exhibition ‘The Art of Bookbinding from Byzantium to Modern Artistic Creation’ (Byzantine and Christian Museum, Athens, September 2012-— March 2013).
Alicia Walker is Professor of Medieval Art and Architecture at Bryn Mawr College. Her primary fields of research include cross-cultural artistic interaction in the medieval world from the ninth to thirteenth centuries and gender issues in the art and material culture of Byzantium. Her first book, The Emperor and the World: Exotic Elements and the Imaging of Byzantine Imperial Power, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2012. She is currently at work on her second monograph, provisionally titled The Erotic Eye in Byzantium, which explores the role of GraecoRoman iconography in the expression and regulation of female sexuality in early and middle Byzantine art and material culture.
Susan Wessel is Moran Professor of the History of Early Christianity at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. She is the author of Reading Augustine: On Compassion, Healing, Suffering and the Purpose of the Emotional Life (2020), Passion and Compassion in Early Christianity (2016), Leo the Great and the Spiritual Re-Building of a Universal Rome (2012) and Cyril of Alexandria and the Nestorian Controversy. The Making of a Saint and of a Heretic (2004).
Maria G. Xanthou, FHEA, is Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol, and Research Associate in Pindaric Studies at the Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard University, Washington, DC. She was a Junior Research Fellow in the project ‘The Social and Cultural Construction of Emotions: The Greek Paradigm’ in Oxford (2009-13). She taught Classics, Ancient, Medieval and Byzantine History at the Aristotle University of Thessalonike, Hellenic Open University, Open University of Cyprus, University of Bristol and University of Leeds. She was a Visiting Fellow in 2020 at the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, Princeton University, and in 2015 Residential Fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard University, Washington, DC. She was awarded academic scholarships from the Aristotle University Academic Excellence Scheme, Hellenic State Scholarships Foundation, and Nicos and Lydia Trichas Foundation for Education and European Culture.
Robin Darling Young is Associate Professor of Church History at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. She specialises in the history and literature of early Christianity in the Greek-, Armenian-, and Syriac-speaking communities. In particular, she studies the engagement of early Christian thinkers with the philosophical tradition, in particular Clement, Origen, Porphyry and Evagrios of Pontos. Professor Darling Young directed the translation and annotation of Evagrios’s Gnostic Trilogy (forthcoming) and has prepared a translation of the Syriac translation and Greek fragments of the Letters by the same author along with the Kephalaia of the Students of Evagrius (Fathers of the Church series). With Fr Hovsep Karapetyan she has edited and translated Evagrius’ Letters in Armenian Translation (forthcoming) and is at work on a monograph tentatively entitled Evagrius the Gnostikos and His Circle: Women and Men as Sages in the Late Fourth Century.
Acknowledgements
This is very much a Dumbarton Oaks book, arising out of a colloquium in December 2014, the last of three meetings organised by Susan Ashbrook Harvey (Senior Fellow 2009-15) and Margaret Mullett (Director of Byzantine Studies 2009-15). We wish to thank Dumbarton Oaks, the then Director Jan Ziolkowski and the Byzantine Senior Fellows for enabling that event, and Margaret Alexiou, Douglas Cairns, David Konstan, Barbara Rosenwein and Peter Stearns for their encouragement in the planning stage. Martin Hinterberger and Aglae Pizzone offered sage advice throughout and Gregory Nagy perspective and inspiration. We thank all speakers, respondents and participants for their lively and incisive scholarly explorations, and the chapter authors for the generosity, patience and goodwill which have brought us to publication. At the editing stage, we are grateful to Ute Possekel for her wise and perspicacious editing of a volume in a new series with a rapidly evolving style, and to Brown University for its generous support. The editors of the series Studies in Byzantine Cultural History, Jim Crow and Liz James, gave their fellow series editor, her co-editor and our authors full and helpful support. Michael Greenwood’s advocacy for Byzantine Studies is legendary and his faith, discerning guidance and patience were greatly appreciated. In production we are grateful to Louis NicholsonPallett, Kavya Shekar, Jeno J and Rosarine Josh. We have experienced a full range of emotions over the life of this book, from the excitement and pleasure of our original collaboration to the relief now felt as we see it close to appearance; gratitude to all involved is paramount. Belfast and Rhode Island March 2022.
Introduction Margaret Mullett
At Dumbarton Oaks in the 1940s and 1950s, Milton Anastos began work on a magnum opus which he later called The Mind of Byzantium! His idea was to amass and evaluate the knowledge of the Byzantines, the content of Byzantine minds, the mindset of their rulers. His project was never completed, though his extraordinary library, now at Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana, is a very good indicator of what might have been used to produce that work.” Of course if it were to be attempted nowadays it would be very different: it would not be about content, but about process: how the Byzantines perceived, felt, dreamed, imagined and remembered, and how they thought about these domains of experience. So what has changed? Why would we write such a different book? Fundamentally what has changed is the neuroscience and the cognitive theory. The processes of the brain are now more knowable thanks to the important scientific breakthroughs of the second half of the twentieth century, notably the discovery of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep in 1953, and the development of brain imaging, positron emission tomography (PET) in the 1980s and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in the 1990s, so that it is possible to see a reflection of the activity of the brain when an event in the brain is induced.* The study of emotion, sense perception,* imagination,> decision-making,° dream’ and
memory’ can all gain from these advances, and in all these areas Byzantinists have been at work for at least twenty years.
During those twenty years views of the brain have moved a long way. The early excitement at the opportunity to discover which parts of the brain were ‘lighting up’, so as to reveal for example the workings of semantic memory in the hippocampus or fear in the amygdala, has given way to a realisation that the brain is not so simple. Far from nineteenth-century phrenology with each function being allotted its special place, scientists are now reluctant to ascribe any particular part of the brain or nervous system to a particular emotion? and think rather of a network of neurons extending beyond the brain. There is no longer a belief in a tripartite brain in which the ‘reptile’ part deals with survival, a limbic area deals with emotion and the prefrontal cortex deals with cognition. Old certainties are disappearing in general: previously clear distinctions between mind and brain, body and mind, between cognition and emotion and between nature and nurture have been eroded.!° Increasingly it is believed that emotions are intricately connected to cognition and distributed over mind, body and environment. Emotions are both biological and cultural phenomena.
This is both good and bad news for Byzantinists. Often science has seemed to move so quickly and scientists have been so divided that humanities scholars have been discouraged!! from attempting to use it to understand the thinking of, for example, Byzantines. The delighted sighting on the anatomy table in 2009 by Jan Plamper of an amygdala, ‘the inner sanctum of fear, the most basal point of the most fundamental of all feelings’,!? is quickly diffused by his awareness that our two amygdalae have subsequently, after the publication of Joseph LeDoux’s bestselling ‘two roads to fear’ theory,!? also been associated with visual perception, smell and the ability of jazz musicians to distinguish improvisation from scored performance.'*
But now on the one hand it seems that science and humanities have moved much closer together,!> and on the other hand there are more works by Byzantinists to lead the way. It has become more attractive for the humanities to make the effort to keep up. Thomas Habinek puts it well for classicists, and it is equally true for Byzantinists:
It’s not that neuroscience provides definitive answers; rather, by articulating a model of thought and action radically different from those taken for granted by most scholars, neuroscience defamiliarises the ancient material, opening up new horizons of understanding, much as comparative ethnography and critical theory have done for previous generations of classicists. Neuroscience teaches us very little about the essential nature of the human organism, except that it is constantly changing through ‘inhabited interaction’ with the material universe. But it gives us excellent tools for understanding the constraints upon and characteristics of such interaction. In that sense it can’t help getting inside the heads of humanists, metastasizing into our disciplinary bodies.
Different schools of emotion science are attractive to humanities in different ways, and they are often explicitly welcoming. The componential approach associated with Klaus Scherer puts appraisal in a central position, indeed multiple stages of appraisal, emphasising the cognitive with clearly thought-out processes and components. Scherer’s Swiss Center for Affective Sciences!” at the University of Geneva makes a clear invitation to humanities scholars. Psychological constructionists like James A. Russell and Lisa Feldman Barrett appeal through their flexibility, their rejection of the built-in and universal and their very constructionism. And they are able to cite humanities research in support of their own.'® The enactivists appeal to the humanities through their qualitative emphasis, their rejection of the idea of basic emotions and their concern for collective emotion. Giovanna Colombetti specifically lists ‘not only psychology and neuroscience but history, anthropology, ethology, sociology, computer science, political science, education, literature and philosophy ... as disciplines making up the field’.!° A promising response is collaboration, as in the AHRC-funded History of Distributed Cognition project at Edinburgh.”°
Keeping up remains difficult. How can we be sure we are reading the right science? And will it still be the right science next year? Clearly, we cannot be certain, but in a series of lucid and learned articles, chapters and introductions to volumes Douglas Cairns has over the past twenty-five years provided a guide for anxious humanities scholars to discoveries and disagreements in emotions studies in very widely differing disciplines. To offer only a few examples, in 2003 ‘Iliadic anger’ declares that biology and culture are a false antithesis, eschewing the ‘us and them’ approach of Leonard Muellner;”! in 2008 ‘Look both ways’ tackles the issue of basic emotions and universality, supporting Paul Ekman against some critics and pointing out difficulties in the approaches of Anna Wiezbicka and David Konstan; in 2013 ‘A short history of shudders’ stresses the fundamental importance of physical embodiment in the concept of emotion itself and makes the case for the study of metonymy;7? in 2017 the introduction to Emotions in the Classical World
explores the cognitive-evaluative approach in classics and points out that not even the concept of emotion is transcultural.24 And the introduction to Emotions through Time addresses Riidiger Schnell’s argument in Haben Gefitihle eine Geschichte? that the history of emotions should be abandoned because we cannot access subjective psychological experience. Cairns argues, following psychological constructionists and enactivists, that many aspects of first-person experience are intersubjectively conditioned by conceptual knowledge, language and culture and therefore accessible; emotions are not uniquely subjective private experiences.”>
The Response from the Humanities
Social anthropology was very early in dialogue with psychology and philosophy,”° and linguistics, sociology, political science and media studies have all become involved,”’ another challenge for the student of emotions. But the greatest impact of emotions research is to be found in history*® and classical philology,”? and we asked Maria Xanthou to trace how this happened; her essay appears below.*’ I shall here simply point to some developments in some other disciplines. All address issues not only of personal but also of interpersonal or collective emotions,*! or emotions studied across brain, body and environment.
The study of literature and narratology has benefited in the past twenty years from the science of emotions. Work on story-telling has shown that it lowers stress and increases empathy.** The affective psychologist and novelist Keith Oatley argues that fiction is all about emotion and asks why we take pleasure even in negative emotions. He regards fiction as useful as well as enjoyable because it helps us improve our mental models of ourselves and others.*4 Patrick Hogan pursues the issue deeper into narratology: human beings, he says have a passion for plots. He argues that story structures are fundamentally shaped and oriented by our emotion systems and looks for cross-cultural patterns.*> Other scholars look at the interconnections between the emotions of individuals, whether through empathy*® or through what is commonly called Theory of Mind. Lisa Zunshine argues that we read fiction because it engages our Theory of Mind and tests this hypothesis over the works of Virginia Woolf, the unreliable, male, narrators of Lolita and Clarissa and in the detective novel.*” Others, even if less explicit about empirical work on emotion, insist on the collective and bodily nature of reading practices. In the case of late medieval Europe as embodied technologies, these are running the fingers or hands across a page, gesturing with hands or eyes or bodies while reading, aloud, to an audience, weeping, fainting, kissing the face of Christ in a illumination or thrusting fingers into a representation of the side wound of Christ.*® This fits well with the concerns of scholars of distributed cognition, where examples that first spring to mind are counting on the fingers, using wax tablets or a cellphone or an abacus, all examples of brain-body-world collaboration in literacy and numeracy.
An influential study in archaeology equally insists on embodied emotion, and necessarily on the collective. Oliver Harris and Tim Flohr Serensen wrote a challenging discussion article for Archaeological Dialogues, responding to the issues raised by Sarah Tarlow ten years before and her call for the use of empathy.*? They agree with her that emotion remains ‘stubbornly underinvestigated’ in archaeology; they urge a move away from a view of emotions as internal immaterial phenomena to an appreciation of ‘how the encounter with the material world is inherently affective’. They propose and define four key terms: emotion, affective field, attunement and atmosphere and apply them to an affective reading of Mt Pleasant, Dorset, a late Neolithic/early Bronze age site with ditches, an enormous palisade and a clearly reconstructed building history. The aim is to find a rigorous way of reconstructing collective emotion from the material record alone. The discussion that follows looks for mundane rather than ritualised emotions, dialogue with psychological anthropologists, awareness of affective regimes and pursuit of specific emotions. It is a very purist approach, necessary in preliterate societies but useful in combination with other kinds of analysis when other source-material is available. And more comparative material is available for preliterate societies, see for example the ‘general comparative approach’ which explicates Palaeolithic rock paintings with help of the art of hunter-gatherers in Australia.4°
Again in the last twenty years, there has been a great openness to cognitive science in performance studies. Since the millennium various studies have appeared which move performance studies to a new phase. They apply cognitive theory and neuroscience research, largely with an enactivist approach," to the discipline of acting for the theatre,” Shakespearian theatre and poetry,* somatic identity of actors and audience,“ spectatorship,” actor training*® and a cognitive ecology of the theatre.*7 More recently Bruce McConachie has published a wide-ranging enactivist study of the bio-cultural basis of performance, beginning with play, then ritual and then focusing on the significant role of affects and emotions in shaping the constraints and satisfactions of all performances.*® He prefers enactivism to Theory of Mind,” in that there are many shared cognitive and affective processes which make bridging discrete minds unnecessary. He looks at the role of mirror neurons and sensorimotor coupling in the process of entrainment and the creation of empathy. He shows that not only are performance studies good for learning,~? but they can also have an ethical dimension.*! In 2018 Peter Meineck published a startlingly original study of Athenian theatre based on distributed cognition and embodied emotions. He analyses the elements of the theatrical experience: theatrical setting and sky-space releasing dopamine, the ability of a mask to project emotions, the part played by kinaesthetic empathy and sensory mirroring in dance and gesture, the capability of music to affect emotions and mood and finally the effect of somatic sensory language and metre. Together, he argues, these features through dissociation, cognitive absorption, enhanced decision-making and empathy created the theatrical experience of fifth-century BCE Athenians. This work promises much beyond its present confines.
Byzantinists and Emotion
As Byzantinists, like classicists and archaeologists and unlike psychologists and social anthropologists, we cannot spend months listening and talking to our subjects or issue them with questionnaires or put them through a brain scanner. We can only deal with text, images, objects, structures and landscape, and there are methodological issues with everything we find in our sources. Texts offer us both examples of emotions in the text, and cases of emotions elicited in the reader. Emotions in the texts may be emotives, emotion terms in narrative, emotional episodes in narrative, or emotionology; each brings its own opportunities and challenges. Emotives, so designated by William Reddy on the basis of J.L. Austin’s performatives in speech-act theory,>4 express the emotion directly: ‘I hate you’, ‘pheu’, ‘oimo’’. It is up to us to determine whether they change the emotional temperature of the text or whether they are genre markers (for example ‘I am about to launch into a lament’). Emotion terms in narratives lend themselves to philological analysis and to the study of metaphors and metonymy popularised by George Lakoff and Zoltan K6vecses, and honed in classics by Douglas Cairns.» Emotional episodes, in which we now realise predictive processing plays an important part,>° can sometimes be tracked in a text. And this is where scripts come in, the opportunity to distinguish between apparent homonyms in a given language or equivalents in two. Robert Kaster adopted Silvan Tomkins’s script theory*’ and married it to philological precision: instead of translating phthonos as jealousy we can spell it out: ‘I am distressed because my friend got the job and I didn’t’. Also in the text is emotionology (what texts say about what communities thought about emotions and their norms).°* In Byzantium these are (1) philosophical and theological, originating in Plato and Aristotle and expressed in treatises, sermons by church Fathers and certain kinds of florilegia;*’ (2) ascetic as developed by Evagrios of Pontos and adopted by Cassian and Gregory the Great, ending in the concept of cardinal virtues and vices;®° (3) rhetorical theory starting with Aristotle, finding practical application for rhetors in Menander and penetrating Byzantine schoolrooms through Hermogenes and Aphthonios and Byzantine scholia and commentaries®! and (4) medical theory, from Hippokrates to Galen and including some of Nemesios of Emesa, which sometimes deals with emotions as well as the longer-term phenomena like core affect and mood which fit more closely the theory of the humours.” Where we can find this emotionology it can help in interpreting emotives, emotional episodes and emotional terminology in our texts.
But not every emotion in a text comes with a label, or in an image with a caption or is instantly readable in a landscape with inscriptions. Learning to detect emotion in mimesis or diegesis saves us from missing significance in narrative but opens us to the same kind of criticism that Tarlow’s championing of empathy met from archaeologists before the refinements of Harris and Serensen: we cannot trust our own reactions to text or image to assume the characters in the narrative are experiencing an emotion. We should however be able to read some emotions on faces if Ekman and his school are correct about universal emotions®™ — but what if an artist or patron chose not to represent an emotion even if the story calls for it?
But as well as emotion in the source we also need to consider emotion elicited in the reader or viewer. Much of Aristotle’s discussion in the Poetics and much of modern criticism of Aristotle on emotion is about the reception, not the representation of emotion. It is a major area of regulation of emotion: how a text or image can control its reception. And because an image or a text does not depict or describe emotion does not mean that it is not intended to elicit emotion. A classic case is the emotionless figures in the Menologion of Basil II: is apatheia expected from viewer as well as martyrs or is the viewer expected to contribute the emotion?
So methodology is as important as theory and the lessons of other disciplines: to understand display, to listen for the silences, to read the metaphors, to weigh words and phrases, to make use where possible of emic theory. And that work is already under way.
Work So Far
When this project began, around 2010, this section would have been very short. Yet we should acknowledge that Byzantinists were for once ahead of the game. Henry Maguire’s work on sorrow in 1977 was a very advanced piece in the field, predating the work of Peter and Carol Stearns for example.® It connected with Margaret Alexiou’s literary work on the ritual lament and built on the observations of David Winfield in 1968 on the representation of emotion in wall painting technique, that ‘it is the figure’s posture and the context in which he is placed in a Byzantine painting that suggest or symbolize his emotions’.©’ As well as setting gestures and expressions of sorrow in the wider context of Greek mourning, Maguire was also able to track the visibility of emotion over time, pointing to developments in the twelfth century which extended the cycle of passion events to include Deposition, Threnos and Entombment®® and with them more demonstratively emotional actors: the Threnos at the church of Nerezi is an obvious case (fig. 12.12). He also saw another turning point in the early thirteen th century when scenes like the Koimesis, already emotional at Asinou,?
gained participants and extravagant gestures of mourning, as at St Clement Ochrid.”° Art historians remained in the van of this kind of work, refining and developing it in terms of a renewed emotional sensibility in the twelfth century”! and — from very different points of view — theatricality”? so that it is now a little-questioned feature of the cultural history of the twelfth century.’? For example, art historians who demonstrate the increasing interest in the double-sided Kastoria icon seldom fail to note the anguished expression on the Theotokos’s face, whether interpreted as fear, apprehension or proleptic grief.’* Maguire’s treatment made it possible also for other art historians to look at other emotions like phobos (fear) and its close analogue, awe.” Alexander Kazhdan had already in the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium focused attention on fear,’° and Maria Vassilaki contributed a short piece to a conference on fear in which she analysed both fear as represented in images (Transfiguration, St George killing the Dragon) and as elicited by images (the Last Judgement); she too believes that fear is represented in facial expression as well as gesture and body posture.’’ Two important recent essays consider awe/fear in the context of church architecture: Sharon Gerstel uses inscriptions on wall paintings in late Byzantine churches, often close to the sanctuary, to show how painting together with corporate prayer could forge emotional communities, and Ravinder Binning on the Pantokrator brings together the dome inscription at Trikomo with a tale in Paul of Monemvasia about the Pantokrator in the dome of the Holy Apostles and the Canon On the Second Coming.’® Ivan Drpié in his study of inscriptions on enkolpia and reliquaries focuses on the role of pothos (yearning, desire) in the relationship of patron with object and the holy person represented.”
If art historians were happy to follow the lead of Henry Maguire, it took a little longer for textual scholars to face up to the challenges of emotions in our texts. The second major influential figure in our field is Martin Hinterberger, who after completing his work on autobiography in 1999 turned to a study of phthonos (begrudging envy) in Byzantine literature through a combination of philological rigour and methodological openness.®° This happened just as Niki Tsironis completed a PhD on the Lament of the Virgin and began to pursue emotion in Byzantium through Orthodox theology, orality and cognitive theory.®! Hinterberger brought together a table ronde at the London Congress in 2006,*” which revealed the potential of emotions research in that it combined papers on the function of emotions, genre, approach, plus a single emotion (shamelessness) and a physical manifestation of emotion (laughter). He also wrote an overview in 2010** which has been a starting point for many.
But it is interesting that the early work of Winfield and Maguire is only picked up in literature by Hinterberger and Tsironis at the beginning of the millennium. Why this gap, when the Stearnses, Reddy and Rosenwein were forging the subdiscipline of the history of emotions, and work in classics was well under way? Is it because it appeared insufficiently rigorous, even subjective? Bedell Stanford in 1983 suggested that it was ‘perhaps because emotions are so subjective and so hard to define or perhaps because scholars prefer to discuss what goes on in the mind rather than what involves the heart’.*4 One might imagine that Febvre’s call in 1941, and the popularity of the Annales school’s study of mentalité in medieval studies in the 1970s and 80s might have made it more possible.*° I can see the points where in my own work I might have stepped into the history of emotions: the identification of emotions as vital to letters in 1981; the development of one such emotion, pothos, in 1998; the assertion of the importance of emotions to networks and to friendship (a concept which brought David Konstan to emotions in classics); many hours in the Evergetis project discussing /ogismoi; work on body language and on men, women and eunuchs; work on lament and consolatio: any of these might have brought me sooner to emotions. It was teaching emotions as part of a gender course in Vienna in 2007 that made me see the centrality of emotions to everything human and their fascinating, yet elusive, nature. Meanwhile, what were we thinking about instead? The themes of international congresses and topics of national symposia in the period might suggest that gender and identity were much to the fore, but they pushed few of us in the direction of emotion. Yet the work of scholars like Panagiotis Agapitos, Christine Angelidi, Ingela Nilsson, Stratis Papaioannou, Titos Papamastorakis and Ruth Webb created a context in which emotion study might flourish.
However, the new millennium brought increased activity, much from early Christian and late antique studies, especially in the United States. Columba Stewart asked pertinent questions of Cassian and Evagrios and became involved in Sarah Coakley’s colloquium on ‘Emotions and Theology’;** a session on garbage at the 2008 meeting of the Society for Biblical Literature led scholars to the study of disgust;8’ hymnography brought Derek Krueger and Georgia Frank to joy and many other emotions.** Yannis Papadogiannakis has brought clarity and thoughtfulness to individual emotions (hope, shame, anger, fear), to patristic genres (lament, theological treatise, disputation) and to urban settings of personal and collective emotions.*”
The complexities of penthos led to revisions of Irénée Hausherr’s classic study, with consideration of the relationship of penthos (grief, mourning) to katanyxis (compunction) to charmolupe (joyful grief) and metanoia (repentance).?” And Martin Hinterberger continued to work on phthonos and other Byzantine emotions, culminating in the monograph of 2013.7! Collected volumes began to appear in which emotions might find a place, notably Byzantium Matures: Choices, Sensitivities, and Modes of Expression Eleventh to Fifteenth Centuries?” which had a remarkably wide brief in which affectivity was certainly one strand. Another such volume was Experiencing Byzantium, a symposium and volume organized by two young Newcastle archaeologists, which allowed treatment of space, senses and three trailblazing pieces on emotions, two influenced by Harris and Sorensen.” Sophie V. Moore applied the theory to shrouding of the body and Vicky Manolopoulou to Byzantine /itai, processions of the patriarchate in Constantinople. Both could benefit from collaboration with textual and art historical emotions scholars; both have much to teach them.”4 Georgia Frank’s paper, ‘Sensing Ascension in Early Byzantium’,”° showed how singing mixed
emotions allowed congregations to more fully experience the drama of the Ascension. Another conference and volume which advanced the cause of Byzantine emotions was the Leventis colloquium on Greek laughter and tears, which combined the interests of Meg Alexiou and Douglas Cairns with a group of Hellenists that had a very unusual bias towards Byzantium: fifteen papers as against four ancient and three modern Greek papers. Nine were on laughter, seven on tears and six on both. More tears than laughter papers discussed emotions; many remained on a purely textual level.”° It was Clear that something systematic needed to be done about the study of emotion in Byzantium: brilliant individual pieces and eclectic volumes did not add up to recognition either in the classical emotions or history of emotion communities, still less to offers of collaboration from cognitive scientists. And without collaboration, it would be difficult for Byzantine emotion studies to mature.
Four projects attempted to make a statement and provide an opportunity for collaboration and visibility: as well as this present volume, three others were conceived of and published during very much the same period. At the 2015 Patristics Congress in Oxford, Yannis Papadogiannakis curated a panel on emotion which was enhanced by a seminar Blake Leyerle had held at Notre Dame on Chrysostom and emotion. There are papers (five) on Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzos, Gregory of Nyssa, Evagrios, Cassian and the Shepherd of Hermas; there are thirteen on John Chrysostom, on awe, fear and love, laughter, consolation, katanyxis, friendship, gratitude, anger, grief, mourning and consolation. Few show overt awareness of the history of emotions, fewer of emotion science, but it is a useful and coherent collection.”
Second, Stavroula Constantinou and Mati Meyer used panels at the Leeds International Medieval Congress in 2015 to look at the interplay of gender and emotion over the long span of Byzantium. They insisted on gender theory as well as emotions theory, and the result is a focused volume in which all contributors are on message; it of course gives most space to emotions considered gendered, so grief, courage and eros take pride of place. Art history is well represented. Both editors offer thoughtful essays at beginning and end, respectively.”
The third project is Emotions through Time, a Leverhulme network which ran from 2016 to 2017, an ambitious attempt conceived by Douglas Cairns and Aglae Pizzone to allow Byzantinists to profit from the achievements of classics in evolving methodologies for the study of emotions.” It comprised three workshops, a dissemination conference and a database of texts and images which will form the basis of a source-book on Byzantine emotion, provided by the members and invited speakers at the workshops. The volume brings together papers from all the workshops and the conference. A great strength is the focus on Byzantine theory of emotions; it includes art history papers and one on procession; it also extends the range of emotions (oxycholia, ekplexis, thauma) and the authors considered in detail.!°° It is published by Mohr Siebeck and races this volume to the finishing line. As we edit, a new flurry of emotions monographs has arrived on our desks: Andrew Mellas on katanyxis in the liturgy is an enactivist reading of Romanos, Andrew of Crete and Kassia. Maria Doerfler’s masterly study of Old Testament narrative and late antique emotion elaborates on her paper below and also on the complex pedagogy of affect in an emotional community; and Blake Leyerle’s synthesis on anger, grief, fear and zeal (plus awe, shame and disgust) in Chrysostom’s sermons reveals the depth of his engagement with emotions and his skill in manipulating them in his flock.'®!
This Volume
This volume began life as one of three meetings planned by the editors while Director of Byzantine Studies and Senior Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, respectively.!°? My original interest, roused by teaching in Vienna, was a very simple one, to arrive at some sense of the constellation of Byzantine emotions. Susan Harvey’s interest, informed by her work on the senses, particularly olfaction, and her work on lament, was compelled by the paradox of religious traditions that claimed to restrain emotions while at the same time ritually and rhetorically intensifying them. We took advice and started to put together a bibliography of works that had helped us. We invited four speakers from Europe and four from the United States in accordance with the Dumbarton Oaks colloquium format and were able to add Henry Maguire’s lecture, responses to each paper,!°? and reports by Aglae Pizzone and Elizabeth Potter, affiliated with two then current projects, Geneva’s ‘Lan-
guage and Culture: Words and Languages’!4 and Oxford’s ‘The Social and
Cultural Construction of Emotions: the Greek Paradigm’,! respectively.
We asked two questions in particular: what are emotions? And why should we want to study emotion? The answer to the first was fairly brief if unsatisfactory. In fact, no one knows the answer to that question: ‘everyone knows what emotion is until asked to give a definition. Then, it seems, no
one knows’! Cairns puts it well: ‘Emotion is a contested term with no
agreed definition and a particular history of its own’!
Why we should study emotions had many answers: because emotions are central to human activity,!°8 because we are already doing it,!©? to correct error,!!® to seize an opportunity! or to solve a problem.!!”
When we put the papers together we hoped to create a grid with as wide a span as possible. And we wanted to look at emotions in the context of Byzantine society, so each author had two tasks: to look at wider associations of emotions with one of the following themes: rhetoric, art, asceticism, liturgy, community, gender, poetry, power, philosophy; but also to undertake a case study of a single emotion. We have not achieved completeness or yet a convincing map of Byzantine emotion: we are lacking specific studies even of the (so-called) basic emotions like surprise and disgust, as well as familiar emotions like shame, contempt, hate and hope (though they appear in other chapters). We are even lacking specific papers on the specifically Byzantine emotions: katanyxis (compunction), akedia (listlessness) and charmolupe (joyful grief). But what we do have is essays that touch on borderlines and clusters of emotions: in the range of sorrow, where /upe gives way to penthos or akedia; where eleos sits on a spectrum of sympathy and pity; what is the difference between chara and apolausis (joy and enjoyment). And we have some sense of diachronic change, though more papers are pre- rather than post-iconoclastic. This way we edge towards our final constellation, not in this volume nor in the next, but before too long.
The title of the volume underlines two important issues. One is terminology. Language has a large part to play in the study of emotion. Here we immediately hit a problem: do we talk about emotions in Greek or in translation? How do we talk to the psychologists and anthropologists if we insist on Byzantine Greek? But how can we reach the Byzantine sense of emotion if we do not use their words? And we should pause to consider the vocabulary of the topic itself. What is the difference between a passion and an emotion? What are affects, and what are imaginings?!!> Two of these terms are common to twenty-first-century discourse, though ‘emotions’ tend to belong to a wider textual community of psychologists, anthropologists and historians;!/* ‘affects’, I suspect, is common in social theory, though it comes out of cultural studies; for some scientists, it refers to a basic substratum of appetites, moods, kinaesthetic experiences.!!> One view in religious studies suggests that affects are non-cognitive feelings and motivations, while emotions are feelings accompanied by cognitive judgements.!!° ‘Passions’ and ‘imaginings’ are different in that they come directly out of Byzantine emotionology, in two major bodies of theory, rhetorical and ascetic, on the emotions we as Byzantinists have to work on: ‘passions’ are Té 740n (ta pathe), and in rhetoric, as Stratis Papaioannou once memorably said, it is all about pathos. ‘Imaginings’ is one translation for Aoytopoi (/ogismoi) in Evagrian ascetic theory, though others of course use ‘thoughts’ or ‘dark thoughts’ or ‘bad thoughts’ or ‘conceivings’ or ‘thinkings’. The argument against ‘imaginings’ is that one expects a phantasia word. The argument for it is that they are something that comes in from outside the individual and wreaks havoc,!!” rather than something engendered internally in the thought processes of the human brain. There is a strong case for not translating ‘/ogismoi’. Classicists have been very happy to use ‘emotion’ for pathos though there is agreement that ‘pathos’ is broader than ‘emotion’. ‘Feelings’ are generally reduced to the subjective perception of an emotional event. ‘Empathy’ is not regarded as an emotion, not on the spectrum of sympathy, pity, compassion and so on, but a process and a skill: the ability to experience another’s emotion. As we look at theory and terminology, we need to be conscious of how Byzantium developed its own theory.
The other issue is of managing emotion. How did Byzantines manage emotion? What do we mean by ‘managing’ emotion? Not, surely, that emotions are potentially bubbling up and constantly need to be pushed down, what Barbara Rosenwein called the ‘hydraulic theory’.!'8 Nor is it a case of the prefrontal cortex controlling limbic and ‘lizard’ brains, or one side of the brain controlling the other.!!? Rather it is a sense of something between control and negotiation in the relations between an individual and the emotional regime,'?° or perhaps a balance between evocation and restraint of emotional display.!?! Elite Byzantines inherited a concern to manage this balance, not least where grief is concerned. Menander Rhetor at the end of the prescription for monody says, ‘This speech should not exceed 150 lines in length. Mourners do not tolerate long delays or lengthy speeches at times of misfortune or unhappiness’.!?* The mask is lifted, the rhetor is walking cautiously in case the family should turn on him, and we realise that throughout the prescription he is aware, if not of the stages of grief, at least the timescale, and of degrees of relationship to the deceased; though it is not expressed in terms of an emotion, he is managing grief. Verbs like Opyveiv (threnein) and névOew (penthein) predominate over nouns, and the clear distinctions of English between loss and grief and mourning and tears and extreme mourning practices and lament are different in Greek. The prescription is certainly all about pathos. In consolatio, the rhetor must first arouse grief before providing consolation. In other cases, particularly in the law court, the rhetor’s job is to rouse emotions (pity or indignation) rather than depress them, as Ruth Webb has seen so well.!?? Managing in
this sense is also what the ascetic does in the face of the assault of logismoi, playing off one /ogismos against another, defeating other /ogismoi only to be vanquished by pride.!*4
While we include a chapter on methodology, it was not imposed on the contributors; there was no party line. All the chapters in the volume address the issues of terminology and/or management, though they do it in very different ways: approaches range from enactivism to metonyms, scripts and emotional communities. Two consider the status of their emotion as emotion. Six touch on neuroscience, nine on the history of emotions; almost all deal with emotions close to but not identical with theirs; methods of control they highlight include condemnation and demonising, preaching, involving biblical models, offering alternatives for the will, developing specialist learned techniques in rhetorical theory or ascetic practice.
The Chapters
After Maria Xanthou’s methodological survey of historical and philological approaches to the emotions, focusing on the history of emotions through emotionology, emotional regimes and emotional communities, Martin Hinterberger addresses the /ongue durée of Greek through the medium of the word phthonos (envy) and both lexicological and ‘scripts’ approaches. He justifies the linguistic study of emotion concepts as allowing access to the emotion, together with the analysis of modern English usage, not in a universalist spirit, but as a control with reference to modern psychology. He addresses management of phthonos through its literal demonisation in the mythology and ends with a plea for more nuanced studies of Byzantine emotion concepts.
Also beginning in the classical world, but addressing a positive emotion, Susan Wessel’s is the first of a series of chapters on e/eos and the nexus of concepts surrounding pity, compassion and sympathy. She contrasts the use of eleos in Greek and Roman law courts (in order to persuade listeners to reach a particular moral judgement) with both modern English usage and early Byzantine Greek, where sympathy with misery expects action to alleviate it. She regards words such as eleos, splanchna, sympatheia, oiktirmos and agape in the Greek of early Byzantium as approximating the semantic range of our English word ‘compassion’. Her emphasis is on healing through tangible aid like charity for the poor and hospitals for the sick, but she also regards healing as reciprocal: practitioners of compassion underwent atransformation and rise in status at least as dramatic as the neediest recipients among them.
Georgia Frank also addresses the semantic range of e/eos, oiktos, eleemosune, eusplanchnia, philanthropia, but with a view to the rhetor’s techniques of eliciting the right result in listeners. She looks at the cognitive, social, psychological and rhetorical effects of pity, as described in the rhetorical handbooks of antiquity, and in particular on ethopoeia or prosopopoeia (speech-in-character) and ekphrasis (description). She then applies this teaching, first, to homilies by Basil of Caesarea, John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzos; then, using Romanos’s kontakion ‘On Elijah’, she examines the superior potential of hymnography both to replicate the techniques of homiletic and to take advantage of the possibilities of dialogue. These techniques together engage the congregation and evoke pity.
Is it possible to see e/eos on a face in a Byzantine image? Annemarie Weyl Carr addresses the image of the Mother of God as Eleousa, the earliest and most pervasive of the epithets of qualification (as opposed to epithets of place) that appear on Byzantine icons of Mary: it appears on widely varied iconographic types, including those with and those without the Christ child. Though historians acknowledge that the epithet Eleousa is applied to a wide diversity of Marian images, the content they give to the term still presumes a visual type of poignant emotive tenderness. The chapter proposes a different avenue by which to approach the epithet’s emotive content as a component of Marian images, and examines kanons, translated in an appendix, by John Mauropous, John Therakas and Theodore II Laskaris to show that Marian kanons are petitionary and that the e/eos demanded of the Eleousa is the capacity of Mary to address the singer’s need.
We return to the issue of mother-child intimacy with Niki Tsironis’ essay on storge. She discusses the relationship of storge with other kinds of love in Byzantium, and in particular philia and agape, regarding it as both relational and reciprocal, rendering it as ‘caring affection’. She first establishes that storge plays an important role in natural selection and is counted as a basic emotion by some neuroscientists; she then proceeds to ask, on the basis of modern research in neuroscience, whether it is gendered, and associated only with women. In Byzantium, she documents the broader use of storge to represent the love of friends and that of God for mankind, especially in the elaborate treatments by Romanos in his first kontakion on the Nativity, and by George of Nikomedeia in his homily on Good Friday.
With Robin Darling Young’s essay, we come to a pair of papers which bear on a second body of theoretical material, the ascetic, which she puts in the context of Alexandrian philosophy. She suggests that what we call pride was in antiquity a spectrum of attitudes, from megalopsychia (positive) to hyperephania (negative) to hybris (extremely dangerous). When Byzantine authors discussed the word usually translated into English as pride, hyperephania, they generally located the discussion of pride in theological texts of a moral variety: edifying tales or treatments of virtue and vice. She discusses whether pathe are best seen as emotions or whether we should consider that like all the pathe, pride was not as much a movement understood as an emotion as it was an affliction — either a form of acute and sudden suffering, or a long-lasting disease — with a treatment that was extensive, flexible and long lasting.
Andrew Crislip also deals with the ascetic theoretical material found in the writings of Evagrios of Pontos and applies it to sadness, the first of four papers which deal with the cluster of pathe which include /upe, akedia, katepheia, skythropotes and penthos. He notes that the expression and management of sadness, regarded as a dangerous passion, were controversial in the early Christian centuries and constituted an interesting counterpoint to the prevalence of pious sorrow in Middle Byzantine visual culture, which Henry Maguire has characterised as depicting sorrow more than any other emotion. The chapter explores this journey, pinpointing the influential psychology of the passions of Evagrios, who wrote extensively about /upe and about the related passion akedia (translated variously as listlessness, dejection, depression or sloth). It reveals important differences between the two emotions and also what is distinctive about early Byzantine approaches to lupe and akedia.
Aglae Pizzone explores the diachronic development of two nonprototypical terms for sadness in Byzantine Greek: katepheia and skythropotes. In particular, she looks at the metaphors and metonymies underlying these emotion terms. Both, she argues, are related to physiological and behavioural aspects that belong not only to sadness but also to shame. By looking at changes from ancient to Byzantine Greek, by considering how generic constraints reshape folk emotion concepts and by mapping katepheia and skythropotes on to the interaction between sadness and shame, the chapter applies to Byzantine texts a methodology well developed in classics, enhanced by a strong emphasis on diachronic change, similar to that in Hinterberger’s essay.
Maria Doerfler looks at penthos (both grief and mourning). She quotes Irénée Hausherr on three unworthy griefs, including the death of a loved one, and rejects his assertion that Byzantine grief was concerned with the realm of spiritual, not human, relations. She then turns to this separate but equally significant tradition of penthos, especially when a death was perceived as ‘untimely’, as in the case of children who failed to outlive their parents. She rejects also the ‘grand narrative’ whereby personal affection and grief is to be found first in the modern period, and shows how Byzantine authors drew upon biblical exemplars of grieving parents to allow emotional communities to grieve together in the hope of calling forth divine sympathy. The chapter sees the Syriac and Greek homilies and hymns dealing with biblical bereavement as a means of allowing a safe space for mourning in the early Byzantine church.
Henry Maguire ends this sequence of chapters on aspects of sorrow and begins another on joy. He first investigates the vocabulary and grammar of the language of emotion in Byzantine art, some still recognisable to us, others lost. Second, he looks at abandonment and restraint in representations of joy and grief. He asks why angels are sometimes seen weeping, and suggests that the tension between public display and interior feeling corresponds to the distinction between ekphrasis and ethopoeia in Byzantine rhetoric. In a third section he turns to the contemporary west and shows that at every stage of this evolution, Byzantine painters anticipated artists of the west; the artistic language of the emotions was cross-cultural. He also notes the time gap between literature and art, rejects any suggestion of wider changes in affective devotion, and concludes that there was a shift in what Byzantines asked of their cult icons.
Derek Krueger offers a reading of Romanos’s kontakion ‘On the Resurrection’, 6 (Oxford 29) and shows that while the hymns of Romanos perform and cultivate penitential self-regard, focusing on katanyxis, they also encourage ebullience in response to God’s acts of salvation, especially the incarnation and resurrection of Christ: Christ’s greeting to the myrrhbearing women in the resurrection hymn commands a change of mood from grief at the crucifixion to ‘gladness and happiness’ in response to Christ’s triumph over death. The chapter examines Romanos’s liturgical rhetoric of joy to assess how the hymnographer transmits and elicits emotions appropriate to the liturgical moment and the lectionary’s presentation of the biblical narrative of redemption, played out in a theatre for the emotions.
Alicia Walker looks not at joy but at enjoyment, apolausis, as embodied emotion. She asks whether it is indeed an emotion, noting its long history in philosophical and psychological writings on human experience: as a subcategory of pleasure, occupying an intriguing place between physical stimulation and satisfaction, on the one hand, and as a psychological response, on the other. She studies the relationship between art and emotion by delineating the role of art in guiding viewers to an effective management of an emotional response. She looks at personifications of Apolausis in early Byzantine baths and at the banquet, then traces the term apolausis in early Byzantine texts, setting the term most convincingly in Nemesios of Emesa’s treatment of pleasure, Hedone, and in the treatment of the good life in the Tabula of Ceres. She is thus able to set images of Apolausis alongside Nemesios in Byzantine emotionology.
The last two chapters address two remaining ‘basic’ emotions: anger and fear. Floris Bernard tackles anger, an emotion with clear physical characteristics but also social consequences: an anger event almost always establishes or alters a relation with another individual in a significant way. Anger is also the emotion which first comes to mind when the control of emotion is considered. He looks at poetry, taking the example of invective. First, he discusses the relationship between the representation of anger in the poems and the cognitive models by which humans generally perceive and express anger in their speech, through metaphor and metonymy. Second, he makes use of Rosenwein’s concept of ‘emotional communities’ to describe the normative frameworks and social motivations which caused a coherent group of people, the mid-eleventh-century literary elite, to represent and value emotions in a certain way. The exercise also alerts us to the sources of social cohesion within communities and strategies of self-expression.
And finally, Sergey Ivanov looks at fear in relation to power in Byzantium. Alexander Kazhdan believed that Byzantines lived in constant fear and this chapter asks whether he was right. Ivanov’s first approach is lexicological: there is a rich range of fear words in Greek with a wider semantic range than in modern English. He also establishes the physical manifestations of fear in Byzantine texts. In a second section, fear before power is considered and identified as sebas (awe). It is ‘the emotion of a loyal subject who prostrates himself before the overwhelming might of a benevolent sovereign’ and is distinguished from excessive or exaggerated fear of danger. The final section deals with overcoming fear and managing it oneself. In response to Kazhdan, Ivanov decides that however dominant fear was in the empire, the ability to manage it was also widespread.
The Future
At this stage so many questions still remain that we have not managed to answer. But there is great hope for the future, a sense that there has been an affective turn in Byzantine Studies, our own fashion for passion, so that now we may be able to extend the grid of emotion and cultural aspect to create a real conspectus of Byzantine emotion.!*> In particular, it should be possible to look at later periods and build on the achievement in late antiquity to look beyond iconoclasm. Students of classics and the western middle ages have also suggested that it is important to see how emotions tie into major changes in the society under study. So for us, key turning points like iconoclasm!”° and the events of 1204!?’ may need special care — though it is notable that the biggest change detected so far is in the twelfth century, not traditionally one of the great crisis points in Byzantine history. We also need to form a firmer view of the Byzantines’ own theory of emotions, their emotionology, particularly through medical theory and the now flourishing subdiscipline of history of medicine. It is to be hoped that we will soon be in a position to engage in other comparative study; we are ideally placed to look at comparisons with the medieval west, as Henry Maguire shows in this volume.'?8 Might confrontations between crusaders and Byzantines make more sense seen through the lens of emotion? And our understanding of Byzantine relations with neighbours to the east might make more sense with a clearer idea of differences in theory and practice between Christian and Muslim societies, especially along the border,!”? Byzantinists have only just begun to take note of recent work on collective emotion and distributed cognition, though liturgists have already arrived there:!*° an obvious Byzantine parallel to the experience of fifth-century BCE Athenian theatre-going!*! is procession, in which there has been considerable recent interest!*? without as yet fully deploying this body of theory. The combination of phobos, chara, lupe, in the context of katanyxis, enhanced by kinaesthetic energy as participants walked,!*? sang,!34 stopped at stations!*> and danced!** together on a historic route, in a monumental setting redolent of layers of history.
in the open air,'** led by sensual accompaniment of candles and incense and the flash of processional crosses, flanked by participating spectators, offers its own dopamine, its own mirroring, entrainment and empathy. We can hope for more awareness of science and of advances in other disciplines; to publish in emotions journals'° rather than Byzantine journals might be one way to encourage the inclusion of Byzantium in future at the big table of emotions scholars. And eventually, we shall achieve enough understanding to make the connections with other cognitive functions—memory, imagination, sense-perception, decision-making, dream—that will bring a study of the Byzantine mind that much closer.
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