Download PDF | Elizabeth Fisher and Stratis Papaioannou Edited by Denis Sullivan - Byzantine Religious Culture-BRILL (2011).
527 Pages
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
Alexander Alexakis is a Professor of Byzantine Literature at the University of Ioannina, Greece. He has published books and articles on Byzantine Hagiography, Byzantine Church history and the history of manuscripts and texts, including Codex Parisinus Graecus 1115 and its Archetype.
Simon Bendall, former professional numismatist and independent scholar, has published numerous articles of seminal importance enriching the corpus of Byzantine coins, especially those of the 12th15th centuries. He is the author of A Private Collection of Palaeologan Coinage and Byzantine Coin Weights.
Annemarie Weyl Carr, Professor Emerita, Southern Methodist University, has written on Byzantine art and the art of medieval Cyprus, most recently in Asinou: The Church and Frescoes of the Panagia Phorbiotissa, Cyprus, co-edited with Andreas Nicolaides.
John Duffy is Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Byzantine Philology and Literature and Chair, Department of the Classics, Harvard University. His publications include Stephanus the Philosopher, A Commentary on the Prognosticon of Hippocrates (Corpus Medicorum Graecorum) and Michael Psellos, Philosophica Minora I (Teubner).
Stephanos Efthymiadis is Associate Professor at the Open University of Cyprus. He recently co-edited the volume Niketas Choniates: a Historian and a Writer (with Alicia Simpson) and is currently preparing a two-volume Companion to Byzantine Hagiography.
Elizabeth A. Fisher is Professor of Classics, George Washington University. Her publications include Planudes’ Greek Translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Garland), Michaelis Pselli Orationes hagiographicae (Teubner), and numerous articles on Byzantine literary topics.
Jaroslav Folda is N. Ferebee Taylor Professor of the History of Art, emeritus at the University of North Carolina. His recent publications include Crusader Art in the Holy Land... 1187-1291 and Crusader Art 1099-1291.
Sharon E. J. Gerstel is Professor of Byzantine Art and Archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her publications include Beholding the Sacred Mysteries: Programs of the Byzantine Sanctuary, and she has co-authored with Alice-Mary Talbot “The Culture of Lay Piety in Medieval Byzantium (1054-1453)” and “Nuns of the Byzantine Countryside.”
Michael Griinbart holds the chair in Byzantine studies at the University of Minster, Germany. At the moment he is preparing a study on the self-representation of the middle Byzantine aristocracy and a volume concerning gifts and friendship.
Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Willard Prescott and Annie McClelland Smith Professor of Religious Studies at Brown University, has most recently published Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination and is co-editor with David G. Hunter of The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies.
Angela Constantinides Hero is Professor Emerita of History, Queens College (City University of New York) and co-editor with John Thomas of Byzantine Monastic Foundation Documents: A Complete Translation of the Surviving Founders’ Typica and Testaments.
Michel Kaplan is Professeur al Université Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne) and Directeur du Centre de Recherches d’Histoire et Civilisation Byzantines et du Proche-Orient Medieval. His many publications include Les hommes et la terre a Byzance du VI’ au XI’ siécle: propriété et exploitation du sol (Byzantina Sorbonensia 10) and Byzance. Villes et campagnes (Les médiévistes frangais 7).
Paul Magdalino is Professor of History, Ko¢ University and Emeritus Professor of Byzantine History, University of St Andrews. His recent publications include L’Orthodoxie des astrologues. La science entre le dogme et la divination a Byzance and Studies in the History and Topography of Byzantine Constantinople.
Henry Maguire is Professor of the History of Art Emeritus at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. His publications include Art and Eloquence in Byzantium, Rhetoric, Nature and Magic in Byzantine Art, and most recently he has co-edited with Robert S. Nelson, San Marco, Byzantium, and the Myths of Venice.
Maria Mavroudi is Professor in the Departments of History and of Classics at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the transmission of learning between Byzantium and the Arabs, bilingualism in Greek and Arabic during the Middle Ages, and the history of Byzantine science. Her publications include A Byzantine Book on Dream Interpretation, the Oneirocriticon of Achmet and Its Arabic Sources.
Stamatina McGrath is Adjunct Professor of History at George Mason University. Most recently she assisted in the translation of The History of Leo the Deacon (Byzantine Military Expansion in the Tenth Century) by Alice-Mary Talbot and Denis Sullivan and is co-editor/translator with Sullivan and Talbot of the forthcoming Life of Saint Basil the Younger.
Cécile Morrisson is Director of Research Emerita at the CNRS and Advisor for Byzantine Numismatics, Dumbarton Oaks. Her recent publications include, with A. Laiou, The Byzantine Economy; she has edited the handbook Le monde byzantin, I: L’empire romain d Orient (330-641) and, with A. Laiou (+) its third volume: Byzance et ses voisins (1204-1453).
John Nesbitt’s (2500 Wisconsin Avenue NW. #927, Washington DC, 20007) major publications include Catalogue of Byzantine Seals at Dumbarton Oaks and in the Fogg Museum of Art, Volumes 1-6, coedited with N. Oikonomides (Vols. 1-5) and Eric McGeer (Vols. 4-5), with the assistance of Cécile Morrisson (Vol. 6).
Arietta Papaconstantinou is lecturer at the Université Paris I PanthéonSorbonne, and research associate at the Oriental Institute in Oxford. She is the author of Le culte des saints en Egypte des Byzantins aux Abbassides and of various articles on aspects of late antique and early Islamic social history and material culture. Her research focuses on the Near East during the transition from Roman to Muslim rule.
Stratis Papaioannou holds the William A. Dyer, Jr. Assistant Professorship in the Humanities at Brown University. In addition to a number of published articles his book titled Michael Psellos: Rhetoric and Authorship in Byzantium is forthcoming.
Manolis Patedakis is Lecturer in Byzantine Philology at the University of Crete. His main research interests focus on Palaeologan Literature, Byzantine Epigraphy from Crete, and Symeon the New Theologian. He continues to edit the unpublished works of Athanasios I of Constantinople.
Brigitte Pitarakis is a researcher at the CNRS in Paris (UMR 8167 Orient et Méditerranée). She is author of Les croix-reliquaires pectorales byzantines en bronze (Bibliotheque des Cahiers archéologiques 16) and most recently editor of Hippodrome/Atmeydant: A Stage for Istanbul’s History, an exhibition catalogue.
Claudia Rapp is Professor fir Byzantinistik am Institut fir Byzantinistik und Neograzistik der Universitat Wien. Her publications, including her book Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity: The Nature of Christian Leadership in a Time of Transition, have centered on hagiography, the cult of saints, social history and Byzantine writing culture.
Nancy Patterson Sevéenko is an Independent Scholar, living in South Woodstock, Vermont. Her publications include Greek Manuscripts at Princeton, Sixth to Nineteenth Century: A Descriptive Catalogue, with Sophia Kotzabassi and Donald Skemer (Princeton, 2010).
Brooke Shilling formerly worked in the photograph and fieldwork archive at Dumbarton Oaks, and currently is Kress Fellow at CAARI (Nicosia) and a PhD candidate in the Department of the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University.
Paul Stephenson is Professor of History, Durham University. His publications include The Legend of Basil the Bulgarslayer, Byzantium’s Balkan Frontier, and (ed.) The Byzantine World.
Denis Sullivan is Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Maryland. His publications include The Life of St. Nikon, Siegecraft: Two Tenth-Century Instructional Manuals, and, with AliceMary Talbot, Byzantine Military Expansion in the Tenth Century: The History of Leo the Deacon.
INTRODUCTION
The relationships of the 25 scholarly contributors to this volume with the honoree, Alice-Mary Talbot, span the full range of her career. One shared classes at the Chapin School in New York City (class of 1956), another graduate seminars at Columbia University in the 1960s, one a year at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, another a year as a junior fellow at Dumbarton Oaks. Three have worked with her on the Dumbarton Oaks Hagiography Database, others as instructors in the Dumbarton Oaks summer Byzantine Greek classes; one was a Dumbarton Oaks co-symposiarch; many were fortunate to be fellows and junior fellows during her tenure as Director of Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks. All have come to admire her exceptional command of the language of the Byzantines, her superlative scholarly output, and perhaps most of all her wonderful generosity in assisting others in their own work. So many scholars have benefited from her expertise and scholarship that all could not be invited to contribute to this volume; we hope that additional Festschriften will appear in time with further scholarly offerings.
Dr. Talbot is the author of four books, editor or co-editor of four others, and author of more than 70 scholarly articles. She was also the executive editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, codirector of the Dumbarton Oaks Hagiography Database and editor of Dumbarton Oaks Papers (1996-2009). Her scholarly work has focused on three major themes, Byzantine women and religious life, sanctity and hagiography, and monasticism and nunneries; her work in each of these areas is always firmly grounded in a careful reading of textual evidence. Her publications include a critical edition with annotated English translation of the letters of the Patriarch Athanasios I of Constantinople and subsequently of the Logos of the patriarch’s posthumous miracles by Theoktistos the Stoudite. She has also translated the History of Leo the Deacon, as well as Byzantine saints’ lives and monastic typika. Among her forthcoming publications is a critical edition with annotated English translation of the Life of St. Basil the Younger.' As the Festscrrift neared completion she was elected President of the Medieval Academy of America.
A few examples may suffice to suggest the coherence and variety of her scholarly interests. In “Blue Stocking Nuns: Intellectual Life in the Convents of Late Byzantium” (1983) Dr. Talbot uses the evidence of typika and other documents to examine the intellectual pursuits of Byzantine nuns, particularly abbesses. She finds that while the experience of nuns was largely a life of prayer and praise of God, aristocratic nuns could and did pursue interests in such areas as theological disputes, religious poetry and architectural patronage. In “The Byzantine Family and the Monastery” (1990) she employs hagiographical texts and typika to explore how the basic principle of severance of all worldly ties with the acceptance of the monastic habit was actualized in Byzantium (9th to 15th centuries) and finds that while over time monasteries generally became more permissive of family visits, some individual monasteries still maintained strict separation. In her article “Female Sanctity in Byzantium” (1998) she investigates the question of why so few women were “canonized” in the last centuries of Byzantium and suggests “ambivalence about the possibility of sanctity for the weaker sex” or “the confinement of nuns to their cloisters” as contrasted with the freedom of movement of monks as possible answers. In “Healing Shrines in Late Byzantine Constantinople” (1997) she examines six major sites of miracle healing in Constantinople with regard to the nature of the illnesses and cures and the relation of such cures to the secular physicians.
She finds that the shrines were generally consulted after physicians proved ineffective and that they were used equally by men and women of all social classes, and in theory, at least, without a fee. A related study, “Pilgrimage to Healing Shrines: The Evidence of Miracle Accounts” (2002) presents similar conclusions regarding access to the shrines by both women and men, and often after consultation with physicians; it provides additional insights on length and modes of travel to pilgrimage sites as well as transmission of healing substances to the sick when travel proved impossible. Two additional studies consider holy objects, particularly images, and related texts. “Epigrams of Manuel Philes on the Theotokos tes Peges and Its Art” (1994) explores the texts in question as evidence of the relationship of personal piety to pilgrimage, the search for healing, and patronage, and concludes that one group of poems was evidently composed to be inscribed on icons or monumental paintings, another to describe works of art dedicated in thanksgiving to the shrine, and a third, highly personalized, to appear on an object depicting the Virgin actually healing the donor. Another paper, “Epigrams in Context: Metrical Inscriptions on Art and Architecture of the Palaeologan Era,” (1999) includes examination of such texts on icons and icon frames, reliquaries and liturgical vessels and among its conclusions makes the valuable distinction between epigrams created to accompany a proposed object and those to appear on frames for already existing works of art, the latter resulting in a “more aesthetic evocation of the iconography and materials.” Throughout her work runs a consistent sensitivity to social history and to the concerns of the individual in an institutional setting.
A contributor’s recollection may set the general theme of this volume. On one occasion Alice-Mary had generously agreed to make a presentation on Byzantine Civilization to that contributor’s undergraduate class for non-majors. Dr. Talbot introduced her lecture with comments on her sense of good fortune in coming to age as a Byzantine scholar at a time when social history had begun to take its place as a recognized and significant area of historical research along side more traditional subjects such as political history. In keeping with the honoree’s scholarly interests in the social context of Byzantine religious practices the contributors were invited to offer articles in three areas, Women in Byzantium, Icons and Other Images, and finally Texts, Practices, Spaces. Each contributor worked independently, but the results reflect the main themes of the volume and in a number of the papers build directly on Dr. Talbot’s own work as well as intersecting with each other.
Six papers offer insights into the lives of both religious and secular Byzantine women. Susan Harvey places an unexpected passage on the “Despised Woman” in Jacob of Serug’s Homily of the Nativity in the context of Byzantine typology to find an expression of Jacob’s compassion for his flock. Michel Kaplan examines the origins of the cult of St. Febronia, its complex hagiographical dossier, and the context of its transmission to Constantinople and the west, while Alexander Alexakis connects a young woman named Hypatia/Febronia in the Life of Sts. David, Symeon and George, with her more famous namesakes as well suggesting a link between the dossier of St. Febronia and her predecessor Hypatia. Maria Mavroudi offers an examination of Byzantine views of the learned women of classical antiquity as revelatory of the Byzantines’ own views of contemporary women and offers a rationale for the apparent but deceptive narrowness and limited quantity of literary output by Byzantine women. Matina McGrath posits an “ideological framework” in the History of John Skylitzes for interpreting the behavior of powerful Byzantine women and Stratis Papaioannou examines Anna Komnene’s rhetorical preface to her final will and testament to suggest how a woman negotiates the androcentric premises which underlie the written medium.
In the second section, Icons and Images, Annemarie Weyl Carr draws on Dr. Talbot’s work on epigrams and art objects to explain the relation between a small icon of the Virgin Hodegetria and the epigram that surrounds it and Elizabeth Fisher considers Michael Psellos’ oration on the ‘usual miracle’ attributed to an icon of the Virgin at Blachernai in the context of the legal case that an “unusual” occurrence of the miracle resolved. In a broader consideration of holy images Jaroslav Folda examines the reinvention of chrysography after the Triumph of Orthodoxy as ‘spiritual radiance’ rather than ‘natural light’ and its subsequent adoption and further transformation by Crusader artists. Sharon Gerstel surveys icons on ceramic polychrome tiles, focusing specifically on four previously unpublished tiles depicting St. Panteleimon the great martyr of Nikomedia and on the workshop which produced them, while Paul Magdalino shifts our gaze to Constantinople, interpreting a passage in a letter of the patriarch Germanos I on a religious image set up by Leo III and Constantine V for its value in shedding light on the controversy over the Chalke Gate icon and the motives behind Leo III’s iconoclasm. In examining the intersection of the abstract and the concrete in images Henry Maguire interprets Byzantine artists’ responses to the paradoxical theological concept that the Virgin gave birth without pain. The topic of coins worn by Byzantine women for devotional and apotropaic purposes engages Cécile Morrisson and Simon Bendall who provide an illustrated inventory of selected examples. Brigitte Pitarakis publishes for the first time two lead pilgrim flasks (used to distribute holy oil) in the Haltik Perk collection in Istanbul and finds links to Crusader Jerusalem in their iconography, while Nancy Sevéenko considers the posthumous miracles of St. Eustratios depicted on the 12th-century templon beam at Mount Sinai and investigates what these remarkable images indicate about practices honoring the saint at his famous pilgrimage site.
In the final section, Texts, Practices, Spaces, Claudia Rapp collects and interprets inscriptions and acclamations in hagiographical texts for the insights they provide on the origins of the hagiographical genre and Arietta Papaconstantinou examines themes of war captives and Muslim impiety in Christian writings as evidence of partly covert intra- Christian disagreements over Islam within the Christian community. John Duffy turns his attention to the Jews of Byzantium, providing an editio princeps, a translation and a discussion of a Greek text of the “Jewish Boy Legend” that resolves the apparent contradiction between Eastern and Western versions of the same tale. Stephanos Efthymiadis travels to South Italy in an examination of the activities of local saints of the 9th-12th centuries whose hagiographical dossiers show little influence from Constantinople, but rather reflect specifically regional political and social realities. Michael Griinbart focuses on both religious and secular forms of memorialization in the Byzantine Empire, emphasizing its importance in the origin of a uniquely Byzantine political self-conception. Angela Hero moves into a world of Christians and nomadic Arabs with her translation of an anonymous 11th-century narrative on the Martyrdom of the Anchorites of Mount Sinai (BHG 307d) and clarifies the relationship of this text to its earlier primary source, Neilos of Ankyra. John Nesbitt returns to Constantinople and re-examines textual and adds sigillographic evidence to establish the number and types of buildings in the ‘monastery’ of St. Diomedes, while Denis Sullivan translates a homily on Nikephoros II Phokas’ recovery of the Holy Tile, presented as a parallel to the recovery of the Mandylion by Constantine VI, and examines its implications for the legitimization of Phokas’ accession to the imperium. Paul Stephenson and Brooke Shilling analyze links between the parable of Nicholas the monk in the 13th-century Synaxarion of Constantinople and a similar story inserted into the Life of Nicholas of Stoudios (BHG 1365), furnishing a translation of the former. Manolis S. Patedakis follows the lead of Dr. Talbot with an editio princeps and annotated English translation of the Testament of the patriarch Athanasios I of Constantinople. Throughout this varied collection the reader will find not only echoes of Dr. Talbot’s wide interests and profound scholarly influence but also new and fruitful perspectives on religious culture in the world of Byzantium.
The editors are most grateful to William Talbot for wonderfully discreet consultation on possible contributors and to the contributors themselves for their excellent response. We are also grateful to Jan Ziolkowski for the opportunity to celebrate Dr. Talbot’s career and influence at the 2009 Dumbarton Oaks Symposium by announcing the incipient Festschrift with a surprise presentation of a booklet listing the contributors and the titles of their articles.
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