Download PDF | Studies in Byzantine Monasticism, by Alice-Mary Talbot, Routledge 2024.
318 Pages
Studies in Byzantine Monasticism This volume includes seventeen essays on Byzantine monasticism, focusing on the 9th to 15th centuries. Envisaged as a companion Variorum volume to Talbot’s Women and Religious Life in Byzantium (2001), this compendium complements its predecessor by focusing more attention on male monasteries, hermits, and holy mountains, while offering some pioneering studies of female patrons,rural nuns,and the links of many Byzantine women to Mount Athos. The volume also complements Talbot’s 2019 monograph, Varieties of Monastic Experience in Byzantium, 800–1453, by offering detailed analyses of topics that could only be briefly addressed in that book. Introductory essays include an overview of the historical development of Byzantine monasteries and holy mountains, emphasising the intertwining of monasticism with urban and rural society. Subsequent essays explore the regimen at cenobitic monasteries, while paying considerable attention to the less well-known lifestyles of hermits, especially those on holy mountains.
Other topics include monastery gardens and horticulture; the culture of the refectory; challenges for adolescent novices; factors influencing the choice of a monastery’s foundation site; female patronage of monastery construction and restoration; the conversion of monasteries from male to female and vice-versa; rules regarding personal poverty for monastics; and the choice of a monastic name.
Alice-Mary Talbot has spent most of her scholarly career at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC, where she has held several research and administrative posts. In the 1980s she was executive editor of the three-volume Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. Subsequently she managed the Dumbarton Oaks Hagiography Database project. From 1997 to 2009 she served as director of Byzantine studies, and finally as editor of the Byzantine Greek series of the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (2009–2019). Her research focuses on Byzantine women, monasticism, and hagiography.
PREFACE
This volume includes seventeen essays published since 2000 which highlight some of my contributions to the study of Byzantine monasticism, both male and female. Envisaged as a companion Variorum volume to Women and Religious Life in Byzantium (Ashgate, 2001), this collection of articles complements its predecessor by focusing more attention on male monasteries, hermits, and holy mountains, while offering some pioneering studies of female patrons, rural nuns, and the ties between many Byzantine women and Mt. Athos. The volume also complements my recent (Notre Dame, 2019) monograph, Varieties of Monastic Experience in Byzantium, 800–1453, by offering detailed analyses of many topics that could only be briefly addressed in the book. The chronological focus is on the ninth to fifteenth centuries, following the reforms introduced by Theodore of Stoudios ca. 800.
Introductory essays include an overview of the historical development of monasteries and holy mountains in the Byzantine world and emphasize the multiple ways in which monasticism was intertwined with virtually all aspects of Byzantine society, economy, the liturgical arts, and spirituality, whether in city or countryside. The selected articles explore the regimen at cenobitic monasteries, both rural and urban, male and female, while paying considerable attention to the less well-known lifestyles of hermits, especially those who inhabited holy mountains. Several articles explore aspects of monastic and eremitic life that have received little or no attention to date: monastery gardens and horticulture; the rules and culture of the refectory; the challenges faced by adolescent novices of both sexes; factors influencing the choice of a monastery’s foundation site; female patronage of monastery construction and restoration; the conversion of monasteries from male to female and vice-versa; rules with regard to personal poverty for monks and nuns; the choice of a monastic name; women’s charitable donations to Mt. Athos; the challenges of an eremitic lifestyle; demonic attacks on hermits residing in remote caves. At the beginning of my scholarly career I had no intention of focusing my studies on Byzantine monasticism, although in retrospect I realize that a visit as a student to the famed Meteora monasteries of central Greece made an indelible impact on me and first kindled my curiosity about monastic life.
Once I entered graduate school at Columbia University to study Byzantine and Ottoman history, a series of serendipitous developments gradually immersed me in Greek texts relating to Byzantine monasteries, leading me to a lifelong fascination with the role monasticism played in Byzantine society and spiritual life. My doctoral dissertation on the correspondence of patriarch Athanasios I of Constantinople (1289–1293, 1303–1309) introduced me to a churchman who was a wandering monk early in his career and founded a double monastery in Constantinople that housed both nuns and monks. Subsequently I edited and translated a text of the posthumous miracles of the same patriarch that vividly illustrated the role of his monastery as a site for pilgrimage and faith healing.
At the same time a key factor in the development of my scholarly interests was my experience teaching history at a small women’s college in eastern Ohio. It was the early 1970s, the era of the birth of women’s studies as an academic discipline, and the dean asked me to design an inaugural course on the history of women. I suggested a more modest counter-proposal, agreeing to develop a syllabus on women in ancient and medieval Europe, including one week on Byzantium. As I pursued the research for my lectures, I discovered Eileen Power’s book on Medieval English Nunneries, with its fascinating descriptions of convent life based on the official reports of visiting bishops.
As I immersed myself in Power’s book, I began to ask myself about the comparable situation in Byzantine nunneries. Unable to find any information in the secondary literature, I decided that this would be a promising new avenue of research for me, and so it proved. By happy coincidence, not long after I resolved to investigate Byzantine convents, Giles Constable, John Philip Thomas, and Angela Hero launched a massive project under the auspices of Dumbarton Oaks (with additional support from the National Endowment for the Humanities) to publish the corpus of all sixty-one surviving Byzantine monastic foundation documents. I eagerly joined the team of translators and produced translations of ten documents, including five of the six typika for convents.
My long engagement with the typikon project in the 1980s and 1990s led to a new focus of many of my publications on monasticism. I also spent most of the 1980s as executive editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, and as part of my duties was assigned to write a number of articles dealing with monastic life, such as “monasticism,” “Athos, Mount,” “nuns,” and “typika.” I should also mention the important stimulus to my research of invitations to present conference papers on topics I had not previously explored, prompting me to move in new directions. Examples that readily come to mind include articles on holy mountains, hermits, women and Mt. Athos, the adolescent monastic, monastic refectory culture, monastery site selection, and monastic gardens. I am grateful to both the conference organizers and the speakers for the stimulating discussions that ensued.
Readers of the essays in this collection will soon become aware of how much my research has profited from and made use of major corpora of documents and texts that have become available over the past half century or so. In addition to the Byzantine Monastic Foundation Documents, the Archives de l’Athos series of publications of the acts of Athonite monasteries, based in Paris, has steadily grown, producing heavily annotated diplomatic editions of documents preserved in the invaluable archives of the Holy Mountain. Many of the acts are property transactions, offering useful information about donations to Athonite monasteries by men and women alike. I have also been fortunate to pursue my scholarship over a sixty-year period that has seen the publication of several other invaluable research tools, especially in the field of Byzantine prosopography, from which I have profited enormously. I have constantly consulted the Prosopographie der mittelbyzantinischen Zeit, produced in Berlin, the Prosopography of the Byzantine World (an online resource created at King’s College, London), and the Prosopographie der Palaiologenzeit, compiled in Vienna.
A final category of sources that has proved particularly useful in my research has been the lives of saints, most of whom were monks or nuns at some point in their careers. The Bollandist press in Brussels has continued to augment the Acta Sanctorum by providing impeccable editions and translations of hagiographical texts, which have been supplemented by volumes produced in Paris, Uppsala, Athens, Thessalonike, Washington, Cambridge (Mass.), and elsewhere. My publications have drawn extensively on these newly accessible corpora of materials, always trying to balance the ideals of monastic rules against the realities that can be gleaned from monastic archives and saints’ lives. This avenue of research was facilitated by my participation in the creation of the Dumbarton Oaks Hagiography Database a project initiated by Alexander Kazhdan in the 1990s and supported by a generous grant from the Mellon Foundation.
This online database, available through the Dumbarton Oaks website, enables researchers to quickly search for references to realia in all the Byzantine saints’ lives of the eighth to tenth centuries. In conclusion I would like to emphasize my eternal debt to two venerable mentors in Byzantine studies, Ihor Ševčenko, my dissertation advisor at Columbia University, and Alexander Kazhdan, my colleague at Dumbarton Oaks for many years. Although these two scholars had very different temperaments and scholarly interests, my long association with both men was an immense privilege and honor, and greatly influenced the direction of my research.
Let me also take this opportunity to thank those colleagues who helped me in the preparation of this volume, starting with Michael Greenwood of Routledge, who first encouraged me to assemble this collection of essays. His editorial assistant, Louis Nicholson-Pallett, provided much helpful advice and guidance throughout my preparation of the manuscript for submission to the press. I am particularly indebted to John Kee, a Tyler Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, whose computer expertise was indispensable in the final stages of making the manuscript conform to Routledge guidelines. I would also like to thank my husband, William Talbot, for his loving support over six decades, and our children Jennifer and Jonathan for technical assistance with my computer, especially Jennifer who converted all my .pdf files to Word documents.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق