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397 Pages
Greek Monasticism in Southern Italy
This volume was conceived with the double aim of providing a background and a further context for the new Dumbarton Oaks English translation of the Life of St Neilos from Rossano, founder of the monastery of Grottaferrata near Rome in 1004. Reflecting this double aim, the volume is divided into two parts. Part I, entitled “Italo-Greek Monasticism,” builds the background to the Life of St Neilos by taking several multi-disciplinary approaches to the geographical area, history and literature of the region denoted as Southern Italy. Part II, entitled “The Life of St Neilos,” offers close analyses of the text of Neilos’s hagiography from socio-historical, textual, and contextual perspectives.
Together, the two parts provide a solid introduction and offer in-depth studies with original outcomes and wide-ranging bibliographies. Using monasticism as a connecting thread between the various zones and St Neilos as the figure who walked over mountains and across many cultural divides, the essays in this volume span all regions and localities and try to trace thematic arcs between individual testimonies. They highlight the multicultural context in which Southern Italian Christians lived and their way of negotiating differences with Arab and Jewish neighbors through a variety of sources, and especially in saints’ lives.
Barbara Crostini is Assistant Professor in Byzantine Greek at the Department of Linguistics and Philology, University of Uppsala.
Ines Angeli Murzaku is Professor of Church History at Seton Hall University, New Jersey.
Contributors
Raymond L. Capra teaches Classics at SUNY, New York. His research specialties include Greco-Roman Iberia and Archaic Greek poetry particularly Stesichorus and Ibycus. He also published on Dioscorus of Aphrodito and has collaborated with Ines Murzaku and Fr. Doug Milewski on the forthcoming Greek text and English translation of the Life of St Neilos for Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library.
Adele Cilento is currently an independent scholar. She worked as interim Professor of Byzantine Studies at the University of Florence until 2012. Her interests focus on Italo-Greek Monasticism and Byzantine Southern Italy. Her latest books have been translated into English and German: Byzantine Mosaics in Norman Sicily, Magnus 2009; Das byzantiniche Sizilien und Siiditalien, Magnus 2006.
Barbara Crostini is Assistant Professor in Byzantine Greek at the Department of Linguistics and Philology, University of Uppsala. She moved to Sweden from Italy for a research fellowship in the Ars edendi Programme, Stockholm University, where she worked on the electronic edition of an eleventh-century illuminated psalter with catena commentary, Vat. gr. 752. A collected volume has appeared from that work, co-edited with Glenn Peers, published in 2016 the series Studi e testi as vol. 504. Her articles are mainly dedicated to Byzantine monasticism and manuscript studies.
Vera von Falkenhausen is Emeritus Professor at the Universita di RomaTor Vergata. She taught Byzantine History at the Universities of Pisa, Potenza and Chieti. Her main field of research is on the Greeks in medieval Southern Italy and Sicily, on which she has published extensively. She is the editor of the periodical “Archivio storico per la Calabria e la Lucania”. Her bibliography is available on-line through the site of the Associazione italiana di studi bizantini (AISB).
David Hester holds a doctoral degree from the Pontifical Oriental Institute of Rome, Italy. He was on the faculty of theological schools at the Catholic University, Washington, DC, and at St Mary Seminary and University, Baltimore, teaching Church History and Patrology, and serving in administrative positions, prior to being ordained in 1990 as a priest of the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese. In June 2000 he was elevated to the rank of Archpriest. At present, in addition to his pastorate of St Mary Orthodox Church, he also teaches as adjunct Associate Professor in Patristics, Church History, Dogmatic Theology and Comparative Theology at St Tikhon’s Russian Orthodox Seminary in South Canaan, Pennsylvania, and is on the faculty of the Antiochian Orthodox House of Studies as an adjunct Professor of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. Among his numerous publications is the book entitled Italo-Greek Monastic Spirituality: The Monastic Life and Spirituality of the Italo-Greeks in Byzantine Sicily and Southern Italy from the 9th to the 12th century (Rome, 1988).
David Kalhous is currently Senior Research Fellow in Wien (Institut fiir Mittelalterforschung, OAW) and in Brno (Institute of Auxiliary Historical Sciences, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University). In Brno, he also received his Ph.D. (2006), now published as Anatomy of a Duchy: The Political and Ecclesiastical Structures of Early Premyslid Bohemia by Brill (2012). His habilitation-thesis in History (2016), defended in Palacky University Olomouc, is about the processes of identity formation in medieval Czech lands and is forthcoming with Verlag der Osterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. His research is focused on the establishment of the princely power in the early and high Middle Ages in Central Europe, on hagiography and medieval and modern historiography.
Giancarlo Lacerenza teaches Biblical and Medieval Hebrew at the University of Naples “L Orientale.” His research interests include the Jewish presence in Southern Italy, with special attention to epigraphical and literary sources from Antiquity to the late Middle Ages. Besides his studies on Sabbetay Donnolo, he authored a number of academic publications and as editor-in-chief he publishes the Sefer yuhasin — Review for the History of the Jews in South Italy and the series Archivio di Studi Ebraici.
Andrea Luzzi is Associate Professor in Byzantine Civilization at the Faculty of “Lettere e Filosofia” of the University of Rome “La Sapienza.” His research focuses on Byzantine ecclesiastical literature and particularly on hagiographical and hymnographical texts. He is an expert on Byzantine liturgical tradition, and published the fundamental monograph Studi sul Sinassario di Costantinopoli, Testi e Studi bizantinoneoellenici, 8 (Roma, 1995), detailing the formation and manuscript transmission of the Synaxarion of Constantinople, as well as many detailed studies on Greek synaxaria and their commemorations.
Enrico Morini is Associate Professor of Ecclesiastical History (Orthodox Church), University of Bologna, Italy. Prof. Morini’s research focuses on Greek monasticism (especially Italo-Greek monasticism), the Greek Church in Italy, the relations between the Greek and Latin Churches (with special attention to ecclesiology), the Greek Philocaly renaissance, and on the investigation of Eastern saints’s relics in Italy. Prof. Morini has published numerous books, the most recent being Iera Leipsana Agion tes kath’emas Anatoles ste Benetia (Relics of Greek Saints in Venice), (Athens, 2005); Gli ortodossi (Bologna, 2002), which was translated into Portuguese as: Os ortodoxos. O Oriente do Ocidente (Sao Paulo, Brasil, 2005); Monachesimo Greco in Calabria. Aspetti organizzativi e linee di spiritualita (Bologna, 1999).
Ines Angeli Murzaku is Professor of Church History at Seton Hall University in New Jersey. She earned a doctorate from the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome and has held visiting positions at the Universities of Bologna and Calabria in Italy and at University of Miinster in Germany. She has won grants including Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship for Experienced Researchers; Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Grant (SSHRC); and Fulbright Senior Research Scholar. Her research has been published in multiple articles and seven books. Professor Murzaku’s publications include the Life of St Neilos from Rossano (1004) (2017); Monasticism in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Republics (2016); Monastic Tradition in Eastern Christianity and the Outside World A Call for Dialogue (2013); Returning Home to Rome? The Monks of Grottaferrata in Albania (2009); Quo Vadis Eastern Europe? Religion, State and Society after Communism (2009); and Catholicism, Culture and Conversion: The History of the Jesuits in Albania (1841-1946). She was vice-president of the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN) and a United Nations accredited representative for the organization Christians Associated for Relationships with Eastern Europe. She is a regular commentator to media outlets on religious matters.
Annick Peters-Custot, Professor at the University of Nantes (France), focuses her research on Byzantine and Norman Southern Italy, and on the Greek communities living here. She is currently studying the Western vision of the Eastern monks, and the circulation, in the Western area, of the so-called “Rule of St Basil,” and its posterior rewriting by Bessarion. She is also leading a research programme on the appropriation of the Imperial ideology by non-Imperial States (Imperialiter). Among her latest production can be mentioned: Les Grecs de l'Italie méridionale post-byzantine. Une acculturation en douceur (IX°-XIV° siécles), Rome, 2009; Bruno en Calabre. Histoire d'une fondation monastique dans l'Italie normande: S. Maria de Turri et S. Stefano del Bosco, Rome, 2014; and the volumes of the programme L’héritage byzantin en Italie (with Jean-Marie Martin and Vivien Prigent): I. La fabrique documentaire, Rome, 2011; II. Les cadres juridiques et sociaux et les institutions publiques, Rome, 2012; III. Décor monumental, objets, tradition textuelle, Rome, 2015 (with Sulamith Brodbeck).
Angela Prinzi holds a Ph.D. in Byzantine Civilization from the University of Tor Vergata in Rome. Her research interests lie in the field of Byzantine Studies, Greek Palaeography, Hagiography and Agiology. She is the author of ‘I canoni di Giovanni Rossanese in onore di san Bartolomeo di Grottaferrata’ in Rivista di Studi Bizantini e Neoellenici 50 (2014), pp. 161-301 and ‘La promozione del culto di Bartolomeo di Grottaferrata voluta dal preposito Pancrazio e attuata da Giovanni Rossanese, in Rivista di Studi Bizantini e Neoellenici 47 (2010), pp. 57-79.
Lorenzo Riccardi earned his Ph.D. Europaeus in Medieval Art History from the Sapienza University of Rome in 2016, with a thesis on late Byzantine Epirus entitled ‘L’Epiro tra Bisanzio e l'Occidente: ideologia e committenza artistica nel primo secolo del Despotato (12041318).’ His articles include papers on the unpublished wall-paintings from San Donato di Ninea, Cosenza, and on other sites in Southern Italy and the Latium (Sant’Andrea Apostolo dello Jonio, Gerace, Anagni, Amaseno, Sutri), as well as on Constantinopolitan art under Basil II. In 2012 he co-organized the exhibition ‘Tavole miracolose. Le icone medioevali di Roma e del Lazio del Fondo Edifici di Culto’ at the Palazzo di Venezia, Rome. He is co-editor of the volume: In corso d’opera: Ricerche dei dottorandi in Storia dell’Arte della Sapienza (Rome, 2016).
Claudio Schiano is Assistant Professor in Classical Philology at the Department of Humanities, University of Bari (Italy) since 2010. His research is mainly focused on the reception of Greek and Latin ancient texts in medieval and modern times, with particular attention to the transmission of Greek culture in South Italy during the Late Middle Ages. He is also very interested in the impact of ancient scientific texts on the formation of modern thought. Among his most recent publications: Artemidoro di Efeso e la scienza del suo tempo, Bari 2010; ‘Les Dialogica Polymorpha Antiiudaica dans le Paris. Coislin 193 et dans les manuscrits de la famille B, in Constructing the Seventh Century, by Constantin Zuckerman, Paris 2013, 139-169; ‘Libri nel conflitto: gli scritti di polemica antigiudaica nelle comunita italogreche medievali’, in Ketav, sefer, miktav. La cultura ebraica scritta tra Basilicata e Puglia, by M. Mascolo-M. Perani, Bari 2014, 135-147; ‘Tradizione e produzione di dialoghi antigiudaici greci nella Puglia basso medievale’, in Circolazione di testi e scambi culturali in Terra d’Otranto tra Tardoantico e Medioevo, by A. Capone, Citta del Vaticano 2015, 215-239; Fozio, Biblioteca, intr. L. Canfora, by N. Bianchi-C. Schiano et al., Pisa 2016.
Gioacchino Strano, Professor of Greek Literature and Byzantine Civilization at the University of Calabria, investigates the links between rhetoric and politics in the Byzantine culture. He is interested in hagiography, homiletics, poetry and epistolography, and published, among other works, the critical edition of Leo Choirosphaktes’ Correspondence (Xth century) and the critical edition of the Nicholas Muzalon’s apologetic poem (XIIth century). His other fields of research include the relationship between center and periphery in the Byzantine Empire and the relations between Byzantium and Armenia.
Cristina Torre, after obtaining Ph.D. in Greek Literature and Philology at the University of Urbino “Carlo Bo,” has been for several years research assistant at the University of Calabria, studying Byzantine history and civilization. She graduated in Greek Palaeography at the Vatican School of Palaeography, Diplomatics and Archive administration. Her main research interests are: Stephen of Byzantium, historians of the age of Justinian, Italo-Greek monasticism, Italo-Greek hagiography.
Alessandro Vanoli was Temporary Professor of “Comparative politics of the Mediterranean,” at the Department of Paleography and Medieval History, University of Bologna, Italy. Among his research interests there are: the history of the presence of Islam in Italy and the history of the West Mediterranean (Spain, Italy, North Africa). His last books include Storie di parole arabe. Un racconto mediterraneo, Ponte alle Grazie, Milano 2016; Quando guidavano le stelle. Viaggio sentimentale nel Mediterraneo, Il Mulino, Bologna 2015; La Sicilia musulmana, Il Mulino, Bologna 2012.
Introduction
Barbara Crostini
This volume was conceived with the double aim of providing a background and a further context for the new English translation of the Life of St Neilos from Rossano (Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca and Novum Auctarium 1370), founder of the monastery of Grottaferrata near Rome in 1004. The translation has been prepared by the volume’s co-editor Ines Angeli Murzaku and by one of the volume’s contributors, Raymond Capra, together with Douglas Milewski, for the Dumbarton Oaks series Medieval Texts in Translation.! Both scholars work in a US higher education environment where the paucity of available literature on topics related to this text is sorely felt. Thus, the endeavor of putting together an English-language volume that could reflect the state-of-the-art international scholarship on this particular region, time and subject was conceived and developed, and this volume of collected essays is its final outcome.
Reflecting this double aim, the volume is divided into two parts. Part I, entitled ‘Italo-Greek Monasticism’, builds the background to the Life of St Neilos by taking several multi-disciplinary approaches to the geographical area, history and literature of the region denoted as Southern Italy. Part II, entitled “The Life of St Neilos’, comes closer to an analysis of the text of Neilos’s hagiography from socio-historical, textual and contextual perspectives. Together, the two parts provide a solid introduction and offer in-depth studies with original outcomes and wide-ranging bibliographies. We have been fortunate in receiving contributions from leading scholars in this field and believe that we have achieved our goal of creating a volume that will disseminate their work more broadly and thereby stimulate further research.
Southern Italy (see Figure I.1) is a complex reality both geographically and historically. It is not only regional through its being on the margins of the Italian peninsula and in-between the Eastern Byzantine and the Western Latin empires, but also compartmentalized as it is further fractioned within itself into a number of individual local realities that defeat attempts at more general characterizations. Such divisions, territorial and political (and therefore cultural), have in turn generated very specialized areas of study, which, with few exceptions, have belonged to Italian researchers often closely identified with those local realities. While the rich and valuable contributions of these schools of research are reflected by the authors within this volume as well as in each chapter’ extensive bibliography, the approach taken here has been as wide-ranging and inclusive as possible. Using monasticism as a connecting thread between the various zones and hinging on St Neilos as the figure who walked over mountains and across many cultural divides, the essays in this volume span all regions and localities and try to trace thematic arcs between individual testimonies.
The fascination of this territory has consisted, from the early middle ages, precisely in this unique encounter of languages, ethnicities, religions and civilizations: from the ninth-century Arab conquests in Sicily and Calabria,” to the extensive Jewish presence in the south of Puglia,’ the indigenous Byzantine Christians had a lot to learn, to cope with, and define themselves against, even before thinking about any distinction with their Latin co-religionists,* who later came embodied in the shape of conquering Norman powers.? All these realities are reflected in the volume through the mirrors of hagiographical narrative and material remains: in the first section, as broad background to the Life of St Neilos; more closely in the second part, through a closer look at the episodes of this saint’s Life. While the Life of St Neilos gives us a snapshot of late tenth- to early eleventh-century Calabria, Campania and Latium, other saints’ Lives and their cults offer rich sources of information for intercultural interaction over a vast and varied territory.°
Part I begins with four grounding essays. The Reverend David Hester sets out the spiritual outline of Southern Italian monasticism by drawing out thematically the strands of observance and asceticism found in the hagiographies. Based on seventeen texts relating to sixteen different saints, Hester identifies a pattern of evolution in the ‘cycle of growth in monastic perfection which can be divided into four major parts: the call to monastic life, the importance of a spiritual Father, the disciple as an apprentice to a Father, and the gradual growth in monastic perfection.’ He further singles out the areas for such perfection along the lines of the biblical and patristic models that are held up to the monk in his journey. While some of the steps towards the attainment of spiritual maturity consist of virtues such as humility and detachment, other features are primarily practical, consisting of activities such as prayer, work, and correct interaction with both people and nature.
The normative aspect of monastic life is brought home by the detailed survey of the extant rules, or typika, redacted for South Italian coenobia, often by the respective founders, but at times anonymously. Cristina Torre presents the evidence, including some aspects of manuscript transmission, problems of authorship and chronology, testing traditional regional divisions and probing the texts for their sources and impact. These documents take us to the heart of the regulated activities of important monasteries such as the Patir at Rossano in Calabria, the St Savior de lingua Phari near Messina, the monastery of Casole near Otranto, and, curiously, to the distant island of Pantelleria where a special institution, at times sounding like a place for detention rather than spiritual solace, is documented for us (most probably) by a text peculiarly extant only in Slavonic translation. One can carry out comparative work between prescriptions regarding a set of common issues, such as liturgical observance, diet and ownership of goods, in order to yield a profile of the coenobitic ideal most suitable to the specific case. But it is often in the degree of detail that these documents vary, leaving us to some extent surprised by the minutiae that were worthy of consideration from time to time, and wondering too quite how these rules matched each reality. An interesting example of such discrepancy is highlighted by Torre in the instructions for the election of the new abbot after the death of Gregory, abbot of St Philip of Fragalà. While the rules lay down that the community should wait up to three years for the return from Jerusalem of the abbot appointed as successor, in practice Gregory appointed his successor himself on the point of death, thus overstepping both the rule and his own previous choice of successor. Travel outside the community is an interesting case of tension between the rules of stability and belonging and the custom of pilgrimages, about which we have many accounts from hagiographies. In discussing the text of Casole, an Apulian foundation famous for his erudite abbot, Nicholas, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, Torre stresses the symbolic import of food rituals and fasting, that show how this monastery is indebted to Byzantine customs beyond its literary dependence on Stoudite traditions. Torre succeeds in presenting an ample panorama of monastic rules without omitting details, while at the same time being able to point to the broader implications regarding allegiance to specific spiritual traditions, as far as these can be determined and discriminated from each other.
Vera von Falkenhausen accompanies us beyond the limits of the deepmost South, across to Campania and Southern Latium, and we could hardly ask for a better guide. Her expertise in the field is witnessed by innumerable citations of her work in each bibliography; yet one admires the freshness of the approach as in each contribution von Falkenhausen takes a different angle and delivers new evidence with unfailing sharpness. Here she chooses to take us on an exploration of the many foundations, monastic and ecclesiastical, of a region that will be key to the transition for St Neilos from Calabria to his final destination, Grottaferrata near Rome. With characteristic assurance, von Falkenhausen handles the documentary evidence and demonstrates her central concern, that the phenomenon of monastic communities in those areas reflected a constant flux of immigrants into these regions, from the South, and, in turn, from Eastern areas that belonged to Byzantium. Like today, people come to new regions with a cultural baggage that does not easily fall away even in new circumstances. The struggle to maintain the Greek language and rituals is successful so long as the foundations could keep a substantial independence with respect to larger local institutions, such as Latin Benedictine houses. Gregorian legislation against private foundations at the end of the eleventh century and its subsequent implementation in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries resulted in a loss of independence, which impacted negatively on the preservation of Greek customs. Thus, while the absorption into Latin customs was not the primary aim of such reforms, which primarily sought to counteract the power of the laity over monastic and ecclesiastical property, its side effects were deleterious to the Greek ethnic minorities in those regions.
A salutary reminder that not all that is Italo-Greek is necessarily monastic comes from the voice of art-historian Lorenzo Riccardi, whose presentation of monumental art and architecture from the territory of Calabria is a fascinating journey into the material remains of the region. Riccardi points out with honesty the often insoluble difficulties of distinguishing between monastic and cathedral architectures, especially when keeping in mind the transitory character of some foundations and the possible change of destination and use over time of the individual structures. In monumental decoration, monastic saints are selected as subjects besides sacred scenes. We encounter an image of St Neilos in the church of St Hadrian at San Demetrio Corone, the locality where Neilos first built a community on his own private property. Even though the present extant structure does not reflect the initial foundation, which was, we are told by the sources, intentionally poor and precariously built, Neilos’s presence in the frescos is a tangible commemoration of that experience. Riccardi gathers for us the images of monastics extant in various Calabrian churches, such as the pair of Phantinos and (possibly) Neilos of the church at Scalea, by some identified as the grange monastery St Nicholas de Siracusa, all the while methodologically cautioning between too readily associating any monastic presence with a sure sign of exclusive monastic usage. Lay and aristocratic patronage, as well as other forms of destination, need to be taken into account for this region as well. The quality of the paintings also provides an important indication of the background to their execution. Their dating, depending mainly upon stylistic appreciation, is often one of the most problematic aspects, despite being fundamental for a contextualized interpretation.
A modern approach to the study of hagiography, departing from the Bollandists’ lists and archives, has sought to understand the nature of such narratives beyond their historical truth-value. New systematizations of primary materials and detailed studies include socio-economic and psychological perspectives, amply made use of in this volume. A corpus of “about forty texts” from Southern Italy is conveniently listed by Mario Re in a recent handbook,’ and it is opportune to warn the uninitiated about the many cases of homonymy only partly clarified by the further designations of a saint through his/her locality or nickname, since these can themselves vary from time to time, and from author to author. Mastering such corpus is not something quickly or easily done, and relying on the work of scholars who have dedicated years of study to a few of these texts reveals the many problems and issues that they contain.’ On the positive side, their narrative textures and strategies offer an inexhaustible source for ever more subtle interpretations. This richness alone would warrant a wider circulation for this literature. It is not clear, however, that distinctive and all-encompassing traits can be gathered that satisfactorily define Southern Italian hagiography as such. Mario Re discusses this problem, and finds some mileage in the characterization of Southern Italian saints as being close to the land and the people who worked the land, that is, as essentially rural rather than urban saints. These saints tied to their landscape often inhabit its most impervious places, such as the rock-cut cave dwellings still visible today. Yet while the Italo-Greek saint is almost invariably also a monk - to the extent that sanctity and monasticism merge indistinguishably —, the heremitical vocation is only one aspect of this choice. More frequently, the existence of communities surrounding these saints forms both the background and the outcome of the saint’s activity. These communities, however, can be large or small, established with a progeny (as for Bartholomew of Simeri) or remaining ephemeral and shifting, as was even St Neilos’s own community before moving northwards and finally finding some longer-lasting stability at Grottaferrata. Stephanos Efthymiades emphasizes the social role of saints in negotiating Christian ideals for the laity.’ For example, the interaction between medicine and supernatural healing practices is a recurrent challenge in many of these narratives, including that about St Neilos. The saint's wisdom shines when discriminating between magical healing, respite from bodily pain and true salvation, often not by displaying a theoretically articulate orthodoxy, but through simple actions performed in the humble knowledge of belonging to Christ as the only true healer.
Aspects of the local saint's interaction with the varied cultural realities of these regions are thoroughly explored by the essays in this volume. Adele Cilento concentrates on the family nucleus as creating special networks among the saint's relatives and as expanding links to a local, but also a more distant, community. By analyzing the tenth-century Lives of Sabas, Christopher and Makarios, she emphasizes how such networks replace the idea of severing oneself from family ties for ascetic purposes. While detachment may be good for spiritual life, it is in fact in the mutual care that parents and siblings take of each other in a hostile world that the tenuous shoot of the love for God can flourish and find a concrete outcome in a saintly life. Resistance to Islam is part of the picture, of course, and is brought peculiarly near by the oriental name of Sabas's mother, Kali. That the author of this triple Life is named as Orestes, patriarch of Jerusalem, testifies on the other hand to the spreading networks of fame departing from Southern Italy, and reminds one of the influx of Palestinian monks into those regions around the ninth and tenth centuries.
The question of influences in style and rituals, and the balancing act that the local realities made between this ideal of Byzantine practice and the more mixed local customs, influenced also by the closeness to Latin-rite places and Rome itself, is a recurrent issue in the assessment of the region and its inhabitants. In the examples from Italo-Greek hagiographies analyzed by Gioacchino Strano, we encounter the thaumaturgic powers of St Cyprian of Reggio as well as the miraculous escape of Luke, bishop of Isola, from the fire which attacked the place where he was celebrating the eucharist in the Byzantine rite. This episode can be considered a concrete reverberation of the theological issues concerning the understanding of the eucharistic sacrifice that were one of the dividing factors in the 1054 schism between the churches.!° The clerical focus of this latter hagiography can also be viewed in light of the more general phenomenon of the professionalization of the clergy, spreading everywhere in the eleventh century, and affecting sacramental practices. The third saint chosen by Strano, Bartholomew of Simeri, founder of the Patir monastery near Rossano, opens up the world of Southern Italy to the interaction with Byzantium. Discussing the problems of exact chronology regarding Bartholomew’s trip to Constantinople and his meeting with the emperor, Strano evaluates the journey as the enactment of that connection of the Italo-Greek communities with the heart of the Byzantine Empire, whence Bartholomew returned with icons and books, furnishings for his new foundations. As Riccardi also noted, this influx in turn stimulates and inspires local production, not least in the area of manuscript copying and illustration. Riccardi touches on the peculiarities of this local production, so indicative of indigenous cultural choices and aesthetic horizons, and a sign of the literature available to the monks in this region.!!
Bartholomew of Simeri is also one of the protagonists of Enrico Morini’s account of how the prestige of Italo-Greek saints, such as Saint Phantinos, undoubtedly spread to Mount Athos. Morini introduces the figure of Phantinos’ disciple, Saint Nikephoros the Naked, who practiced his ascetic feats on the Holy Mountain. Despite subsequent traditions preserving nicknames such as ‘Italian’ and ‘Calabrian’ which would indicate a Southern Italian origin, exactly who came from where is not always certain. Athonite monasticism, which was at that time being developed according to the rule of Athanasios the Athonite, forms the changing backdrop to these monks’s Lives, in a climate where the tension between solitary and cenobitic forms of monasticism was still — and perhaps always remained - rife with resonances. Signs of strife between competing ideals are reflected back onto issues of ethnicity and provenance, as the documents from Athos analyzed by Morini attest. Nevertheless, a continued interest of this central monastic community (or rather, federation of communities) in the best products of the Italo-Greek experience of ascesis is both attested and continues down to modern times.
This first more general part is concluded by the essay by Claudio Schiano on Nicholas of Otranto, whom we have already mentioned above as the most famous abbot of Casole in Puglia. This exceptionally learned monk is presented as a singular witness to the complex relations that had to be negotiated between papal obedience and a deep understanding and sense of belonging to the Byzantine tradition. Nicholas, too, traveled to Constantinople, and it is interesting to witness that in the twelfth century the traffic of books might well have gone both ways. Schiano’s study focuses on the textual tradition of the Tria syntagmata, delineating the context of its bold and original pronouncements on dogmas and canon law made, however, in a spirit of constructive confrontation rather than sheer hostile controversy.? Thus Nicholas is well-placed as a mediator with Rome and intercedes through his informed and learned perorations for the preservation of Greek custom all the while remaining within the Roman jurisdiction, as Schiano fascinatingly exposes. Although happening at a particular time and place, Nicholas’s intervention can be taken as symbolic of that constant renegotiation of boundaries and allegiances that each bishop and community experienced in the area of Southern Italy between the ninth and thirteenth centuries.
With Part II, we turn our focus more narrowly on the text of the Life of St Neilos. The Greek text was edited by Germano Giovanelli in 1976, but a new edition, revised after the meticulous work by Enrica Follieri, is in press thanks to her students, Francesco D’Aiuto and Andrea Luzzi, the latter also a contributor to this volume. One by one, we encounter in this section the themes already broached in the opening part, but through different sources. We begin with issues of interfaith and intercultural interaction, with the Jewish and Muslim world respectively, in the essays by Giancarlo Lacerenza and Alessandro Vanoli. Lacerenza takes us step by step through the purportedly anti-Jewish passages of the Life, which are mainly known through the episode(s) of the encounter with the figure of the Jewish doctor, Shabbetai Donnolo. Lacerenza is able to expose the biblical and other traditional references that underlie the literary construction of these passages in the hagiography, and to at least partially explain through these references the otherwise puzzling situations described as historical in the Life. Particularly significant is the episode in which a man whose relative had killed a Jew is threatened with crucifixion. Neilos intercedes for this innocent man by addressing the Jewish judge with an exhortation to honor the Old Testament law, casting the terms of this law in seemingly ambiguous, but ultimately biblical, terms. The anachronistic nature of crucifixion as a punishment pushes the meaning onto a different plane of reasoning, where, however, mention of these references still operates a semantic transfer and allows for a meaningful exchange and outcome between the parties concerned. It is rather our problem to decode quite how these relationships functioned, but that they did take place outside blanket exchanges of prejudiced insults is a tribute to the shared dignity of both parties in the workings of this mixed society.
The Arabs in Alessandro Vanoli’s contribution are present as traders, as well as enemies to the safety of Christians in the region. Using primary Arab sources, Vanoli builds a geography of interaction and exchanges around nevralgic sea-ports, such as Amantea, that acted as trading stops in the routes from Africa to Northern Europe, and from Spain to the East. Vanoli also stresses the daily presence of Muslims in the region, and recalls the building of a mosque in tenth-century Reggio. This fact creates a significant parallel between Reggio and Constantinople, where similarly the use of a mosque (masgida) for Muslim prisoners and merchants is recorded in the sources from that time.? Even this detail separates out the reality of Southern Italy from that of the rest of the Italian peninsula, and further north in Europe, and makes the experience of its population closer to the cultural diversity of the Byzantines at the heart of the Empire.
The next two papers are more narrowly focused on questions of interpretation. Raymond Capra writes an extended commentary note on one single lexeme used by Neilos, ‘ceramiclast,’ or in transliteration ‘chytroklastes,’ eviscerating all the possible implications for this hapax legomenon invented by the saint, or by his hagiographer. Capra singles out the two parts that make this new word for deep exploration, ‘chytra’ and ‘klazw,’ each component explored through the recesses of ancient Greek usage and yielding a sacred ritual background for the ‘broken pot’ at the center of the episode from Neilos’s Life, where a disciple’s carelessness is reprimanded by the saint. The assonance with ‘iconoclast’ is also noted by Capra as a sign of typological stigmatization of a fault, with wider implications. This essay is a good example of how philological investigation, even when limited to one curious word, can open up a world of resonances and significances for those who take the time to look into the value of linguistic choices.
Andrea Luzzi certainly belongs to this group of careful philologists. Like his teacher, Enrica Follieri, he can pause and ask of the text all the possible nuances and implications. The passage, or rather, the lacuna in the transmitted Greek text that he is analyzing for this volume is one such instance. With sure hand, Luzzi leads us through the hazards of manuscript transmission, and warns against easy conclusions when looking at material evidence. The now-missing leaves in a Grottaferrata manuscript contained a passage whose contents are now only preserved in the Latin translation by Cardinal Guglielmo Sirleto (d. 1585). Scholars who have examined the matter, among them Follieri herself and recently Stefano Caruso, have put forward the hypothesis of voluntary curtailing —in other words, of intentional censuring — of the text, due to the compromising contents of the episode. Nevertheless, Luzzi re-examines both the context of the passage, and the practical dynamics of manuscript transmission, indicating that cause of the lacuna is unlikely to have been anything other than accidental, and, further, that the compromising passage with allegedly homoerotic overtones is in fact much less damning in this sense than previously thought. Ultimately, Luzzi’s analysis is convincing. Surely, one learns a lot in the process about the transmission of the Life and its readership by cardinals, scholars and the wider audience of monastic and lay communities interested in the Life of this saint.
With David Kalhous and Annick Peters-Custot we return to encounters between cultures. The Northern European saint, Adalbert of Prague, meets St Neilos in Rome, but the contours of this trip, its chronology and its causes are far from clear from the complex state in which the sources have reached us. Kalhous invokes a re-evaluation of the evidence. Adalbert is depicted as a restless person, likely of noble origins, who could have served as the bishop to his home church had he not in fact desired even greater challenges. One is struck by the fact that, despite his trip south, Adalbert honors the spoils of the great Benedict in the Northern French abbey of Fleury, while in the hymns that Neilos dedicates to saint Benedict, written in the shadow of Montecassino, it is here in Campania that Benedict’s body lies, incontrovertibly.!* As Peters-Custot shows, Neilos is imbued of the local reality of Valleluce, and moves along with Benedict in the landscape of Latium and Campania. His Greek poems in honor of Benedict, light of the Latins and legislator of all monks, play the part of advertising Montecassino as the saint’s final resting place, and thus as a place for pilgrimage for the whole of Southern Italy, conveniently also located on the way to Rome. It is not surprising that Benedict is known to the East, as his Life, included in the Dialogues by Pope Gregory the Great, was translated into Greek by Pope Zacharias soon after its composition. Peters-Custot examines the relationship between the Greek Life and the verses, pointing out similarities and differences due to authorial choices as well as genre constraints. In the parallel Greek text (from Gassisi’s 1906 edition) and English translation that she offers as an appendix to her paper, she helpfully includes references to this source in the margin.
From Montecassino, the final two papers lead us on to Neilos’s final destination and “long-lasting” oeuvre, namely, the foundation of the monastery of Grottaferrata on the hills surrounding Rome, known as the ‘Castelli Romani.’ The Byzantine rite monastery placed close to the see of the papacy is still functioning today, preserving in its library a treasury of Greek manuscripts, among which many witnesses to the activities of Southern Italian monks and their liturgy, and still living a Byzantine liturgical tradition in the architecture, decoration and rituals of its church.!° Ines Angeli Murzaku is very keen to emphasize the foreignness of Neilos in his constant moving forward to new territories, embodying the ideal of xeniteia that makes of this life, and of its various adventures, only a temporary transition towards the eternal abodes. Yet while living this idea of transitoriness, Neilos did establish a heritage that outlasted him. Neilos's progeny comes to fulfillment in the Life of his disciple and fourth abbot of Grottaferrata, Bartholomew, whose figure is presented in the contribution by Angela Prinzi. Prinzi is sensitive in discerning the connections between hagiographical and hymnographical traditions, raising methodological issues that are applicable to this case, as well as to others (such as Neilos's treatment of Benedict). Bartholomew's cult found new impetus in the thirteenth century, when John of Rossano was commissioned to write a new set of texts for his celebration, still extant in John’s autograph manuscript at Grottaferrata. Prinzi takes us back and forth between the Rossanese origins, reflected onto Bartholomew from Neilos, and the new place of Grottaferrata, where Bartholomew lived the first moves of the new community together with Neilos, all the while looking at how the tradition about him was retrospectively enriched and modified ad hoc to fit the new needs of the community. Emblematic is the example of the interaction between Saint Bartholomew and Pope Benedict IX (Thephylact of Tusculum), where the pope (then also anti-pope) is not only helped by the saint to repent of his sin, but also led to join the monastic community after renouncing the pontificate. With the subtle manipulation of the details of the story of Bartholomew, we are led by Prinzi full-circle to the living tradition of Italo-Greek monasticism, from its cultural roots in Calabria to its vital expansion and sustenance at the doors of Rome.
There is no doubt, I think, that Southern Italy acted as a pivot between Latin and Greek Christianity because of its privileged position, which rendered its inhabitants and its monastics imbued with a double tradition, as well as with a deeper understanding of co-habitation between cultures and religions." So much transpires clearly from the pages of this volume, where many different aspects and details of such variety come to the fore from the pages dedicated to the description of the lives of a few special men, the Italo-Greek monastic saints. Towering among them is St Neilos, whose special charism consisted not only in his great asceticism leading to all the signs of spiritual maturity and wisdom, but also in his capacity for interaction with all the surrounding realities of his region, and beyond. We hope to stimulate the readers to continue in the discovery of his Life as a first-hand guide to Southern Italian Byzantine monasticism.
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