The Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography

The Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography
Author: Stephanos Efthymiadis
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 578
Release: 2020-02-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351393278

For an entire millennium, Byzantine hagiography, inspired by the veneration of many saints, exhibited literary dynamism and a capacity to vary its basic forms. The subgenres into which it branched out after its remarkable start in the fourth century underwent alternating phases of development and decline that were intertwined with changes in the political, social and literary spheres. The selection of saintly heroes, an interest in depicting social landscapes, and the modulation of linguistic and stylistic registers captured the voice of homo byzantinus down to the end of the empire in the fifteenth century. The seventeen chapters in this companion form the sequel to those in volume I which dealt with the periods and regions of Byzantine hagiography, and complete the first comprehensive survey ever produced in this field. The book is the work of an international group of experts in the field and is addressed to both a broader public and the scholarly community of Byzantinists, medievalists, historians of religion and theorists of narrative. It highlights the literary dimension and the research potential of a representative number of texts, not only those appreciated by the Byzantines themselves but those which modern readers rank high due to their literary quality or historical relevance.

Studies on Eastern Orthodox Church Chant

Studies on Eastern Orthodox Church Chant
Author: Svetlana Kujumdzieva
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2023-09-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000931927

This book focuses on the compilation of the different practices of Eastern Orthodox Chant, looking at the subject through various languages, practices, and liturgical books and letters. The subject of this book is also analysed through newly found, unique material, to provide the entire history of Eastern Orthodox Chant, from the ninth to the nineteenth centuries and approached through a number of different disciplines. The book consists of sixteen topics, grouped in four parts: Studies on Genre, Studies on Liturgical Books, Studies on Distinguished Men of Letters, and Studies on Bulgarian Orthodox Church Chant. The aim of the book is to present the Eastern chant as a phase in the evolution of Mediterranean art, which is the cradle of Graeco-Roman heritage. This complex study brings in a variety of sources to show the purpose of Eastern Orthodox Chant as strengthening the Christian faith during the Middle Ages and the revival of Balkan nationalism in the nineteenth century. This book will appeal to students and scholars alike, interested in liturgical musical books, liturgy, and chant repertory. Likewise, it will be of interest to those engaged in medieval and early modern history, music, and culture.

Codex Lesbiacus Leimonos 11

Codex Lesbiacus Leimonos 11
Author: Orthodox Eastern Church
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 493
Release: 2010
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110221292

The book is an annotated critical edition of an unpublished collection of hymnographical texts, preserved in the eleventh-century Greek manuscript 11 of the library of Leimonos monastery, Lesbos, Greece. This important codex is a Menaion for June comprising thirty akolouthiai on saints; nineteen of them are hitherto unpublished. The edition of the texts is accompanied by an introduction, a liturgical, palaeographical, and hymnographical commentary, appendices of unpublished hymns preserved in manuscripts other than Lesbiacus Leimonos 11, and indices. The introduction examines codex Lesbiacus Leimonos 11 and its importance from a liturgical, hymnographical, and palaeographical perspective. It is divided into four chapters. The first presents the liturgical environment of the period from the ninth century, when most of the texts edited were composed, to the eleventh, when the production of the codex could be placed, and the liturgical books used in the period, the structure of the akolouthiai and the festal calendar of the Byzantine church. The second chapter deals with the content of the texts edited. Chapter Three presents briefly the life and the hymnographical work of the authors of the texts. The last chapter of the introduction is devoted to the manuscript tradition of the texts.

The Testament of Job

The Testament of Job
Author: Maria Haralambakis
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2012-09-06
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0567064980

Maria Haralambakis provides a wide-ranging study of the pseudepigraphon the Testament of Job. Haralambakis begins with textual issues, considering the recent publication of a 4th century Coptic codex of the text, as well as the more well-know Byzantine Greek manuscripts. However, she also considers a much larger number of Slavonic manuscripts than many scholars. Rather than working backwards from the most recent manuscripts to a hypothetical original text, Haralambakis presents the manuscripts from earliest to latest as a succession of witnesses to the text of the Testament of Job, each valuable as evidence of its contemporary world. Haralambakis moves on to examine the structure of the Testament as a remarkable literary work, employing narrative theory to demonstrate how the composition works as a well crafted appealing story. Gleaning insights from the text's widespread presence in Byzantine and Slavonic Christian churches Haralambakis examines its reception history, asserting that in these contexts the story came to be viewed as something akin to a life of saint.

Greek Manuscripts at Princeton, Sixth to Nineteenth Century

Greek Manuscripts at Princeton, Sixth to Nineteenth Century
Author: Sofia Kotzabassi
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 522
Release: 2010
Genre: Antiques & Collectibles
ISBN:

This is the first comprehensive scholarly publication of the rich holdings of Greek manuscripts and miniatures in Princeton, New Jersey, housed in the Firestone Library and the art museum of Princeton University, in the Scheide Library, and in Princeton Theological Seminary. This important material represents both a broad range of time--from the early Byzantine period through the mid-nineteenth century--and a broad range of content, from Byzantine copies of classical texts to Gospel books, Lectionaries and patristic homilies, hymns and texts of the liturgy, medical books, and Holy Land pilgrimage guides. Among the manuscripts are some spectacularly illustrated works, key monuments in the history of Byzantine illumination: an eleventh-century codex of John Klimax's Heavenly Ladder with vivid and unusual depictions of monastic life; evangelist portraits from a number of artistic periods and centers; extraordinary pages of pure ornament; and fine examples of post-Byzantine liturgical illustration of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Among the most significant texts are a sixth-century palimpsest with Greek hymns in an extremely early form of musical notation, and a thirteenth-century copy of Aristotle's Organon, heavily annotated by the renowned Byzantine scholar and teacher John Chortasmenos (ca. 1370-1430). The collection also includes a fascinating eighteenth-century genealogical chronicle--a 45-foot-long roll with 562 illustrations of biblical events and personalities from the Creation to the Ascension of Christ, a work that was probably produced in the area of present-day Romania. This collection offers insight into many aspects of the artistic and intellectual life--theological, monastic, scholarly, ecclesiastical--of the Byzantine and post-Byzantine world. It also contributes to the history of Greek philology and the development of the Greek book over more than a millennium, from the earliest centuries of manuscript production down to the period when, long after the appearance of printing, liturgical texts continued to be copied by hand and lavishly illuminated. The catalogue provides codicological and art-historical analysis of all 64 manuscripts and leaves, along with detailed information on their content, provenance, and bindings; extensive bibliographies; and ample plates, almost all of them in color.

Imagining the Byzantine Past

Imagining the Byzantine Past
Author: Elena N. Boeck
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2015-07-09
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1107085810

The first comparative, cross-cultural study of medieval illustrated histories that engages in a direct, confrontational dialogue with Byzantine historical memory.

Roads to Health

Roads to Health
Author: G. Geltner
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2019-08-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812251350

In Roads to Health, G. Geltner demonstrates that urban dwellers in medieval Italy had a keen sense of the dangers to their health posed by conditions of overcrowding, shortages of food and clean water, air pollution, and the improper disposal of human and animal waste. He consults scientific, narrative, and normative sources that detailed and consistently denounced the physical and environmental hazards urban communities faced: latrines improperly installed and sewers blocked; animals left to roam free and carcasses left rotting on public byways; and thoroughfares congested by artisanal and commercial activities that impeded circulation, polluted waterways, and raised miasmas. However, as Geltner shows, numerous administrative records also offer ample evidence of the concrete measures cities took to ameliorate unhealthy conditions. Toiling on the frontlines were public functionaries generally known as viarii, or "road-masters," appointed to maintain their community's infrastructures and police pertinent human and animal behavior. Operating on a parallel track were the camparii, or "field-masters," charged with protecting the city's hinterlands and thereby the quality of what would reach urban markets, taverns, ovens, and mills. Roads to Health provides a critical overview of the mandates and activities of the viarii and camparii as enforcers of preventive health and safety policies between roughly 1250 and 1500, and offers three extended case studies, for Lucca, Bologna, and the smaller Piedmont town of Pinerolo. In telling their stories, Geltner contends that preventive health practices, while scientifically informed, emerged neither solely from a centralized regime nor as a reaction to the onset of the Black Death. Instead, they were typically negotiated by diverse stakeholders, including neighborhood residents, officials, artisans, and clergymen, and fostered throughout the centuries by a steady concern for people's greater health.

The Cambridge History of Christianity: Volume 5, Eastern Christianity

The Cambridge History of Christianity: Volume 5, Eastern Christianity
Author: Michael Angold
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 592
Release: 2006-08-17
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0521811139

This volume encompasses the whole Christian Orthodox tradition from 1200 to the present. Its central theme is the survival of Orthodoxy against the odds into the modern era. It celebrates the resilience shown in the face of hostile regimes and social pressures in this often-neglected period of Orthodox history.