The Hagiographer's Craft: Narrators and Focalisation in Byzantine Hagiography in Christa Gray and James Corke-Webster (eds), 'The Hagiographical Experiment: Developing Discourses of Sainthood' (Brill, 2020), pp. 300-32 (original) (raw)
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Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 2021
This article is a first attempt to approach the figure of the storyteller in three types of early Byzantine tale collections (fourth-seventh centuries): collective biography, miracle collection, and collection of edifying tales. Our approach draws significantly on Walter Benjamin's discussion of the storyteller and Monica Fludernik's work on conversational storytelling. Our analysis has a twofold purpose: first, to revise the impression that the storyteller is a canonical force that possesses the same characteristics in every single tale; second, to suggest that the storyteller is an inherent feature of short hagiographical narratives.
Positionsbestimmungen: Mediävistik im kulturgeschichtlichen Kontinuum. Festschrift für Felicitas Schmieder , 2025
The research for this article has been financed by a grant from the A. G. Leventis Foundation in the framework of a two-year project on Byzantine miracle story collections (2019-2021), and co-funded by the European Regional Development Fund and the Republic of Cyprus through the Foundation of Research and Innovation (Project: Post-Doc/0718/0021). Furthermore, some of the ideas that inform the article's arguments were developed within the framework of the project "Network for Medieval Arts and Rituals" (NetMAR), which received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 951875.
The Self through the Other in Byzantine and Jewish Liturgies: A Comparative Exercise
Orthodox Liturgy and Anti-Judaism, 2024
How can we understand the ways in which Greek Orthodox and Jewish liturgies have historically portrayed each other? To move beyond a simple description, Langer and Tonias engage in a multi-step, multi-directional comparison. An analysis of the modes in which the “other” appears in these liturgies generates important and productive new insights into the similarities and differences between the traditions and deepens our understanding of them in their own integrity. Narrative, as expected, plays an important liturgical role with respect to the portrayal of the “other” in liturgy. However, while the respective Jewish and Christian narratives possess structural similarities, they play roles that are functionally different. The paper demonstrates that this difference is related to the universal and particular eschatological visions presented in the Christian and Jewish liturgies.
This dissertation -- soon to be reworked into a monograph -- offers the first systematic historical contextualization and literary analysis of the five saints’ lives composed by Philotheos Kokkinos (ca. 1300–1378) for his contemporaries Nikodemos the Younger, Sabas the Younger, Isidore Boucheir, Germanos Maroules, and Gregory Palamas. Notwithstanding Kokkinos’ prominent role in the political and ecclesiastical scene of fourteenth-century Byzantium, as well as the size and significance of his hagiographic oeuvre, both the hagiographer and his saints’ lives have received surprisingly little scholarly attention. My dissertation fills this gap and shows Kokkinos as a gifted hagiographer who played a leading role, both through his ecclesiastical authority and hagiographic discourse, in orchestrating the societal breakthrough of hesychast theology that has remained at the core of Christian Orthodoxy up to this day. The dissertation is structured in three parts. The first, Philotheos Kokkinos and His OEuvre, offers an extensive biographical portrait of Kokkinos, introduces his literary oeuvre, and discusses its manuscript tradition. A thorough palaeographical investigation of fourteenth-century codices carrying his writings reveals Kokkinos’ active involvement in the process of copying, reviewing, and publishing his own works. This section includes an analysis of the “author’s edition” manuscript Marcianus graecus 582, and presents its unusual fate. Moreover, Part I establishes the chronology of Kokkinos’ vitae of contemporary saints and offers biographical sketches of his heroes, highlighting their relationship to their hagiographer. The second part, Narratological Analysis of Kokkinos’ Vitae of Contemporary Saints, constitutes the first comprehensive analysis of Kokkinos’ narrative technique. It first discusses the types of hagiographic composition (‘hagiographic genre’) Kokkinos employed for his saints’ lives (hypomnema, bios kai politeia, and logos), and then it offers a detailed investigation that sheds light on the organization of the narrative in Kokkinos’ vitae and his use of specific narrative devices. This includes a discussion of hesychastic elements couched in the narrative. Part II concludes with considerations on Kokkinos’ style and intended audience. The third part, Saints and Society, begins with a detailed quantitative and qualitative analysis of the miracle accounts Kokkinos wove in his saints’ lives. This considers the miracle typology, types of afflictions, methods of healing, and the demographic characteristics of the beneficiaries (such as age, gender, and social status), revealing that Kokkinos shows a predilection for including miracles for members of the aristocracy. Second, it presents Kokkinos’ view on the relationship between the imperial office and ecclesiastical authority by analysing how he portrays the emperor(s) in his vitae. Moreover, this part addresses the saints’ encounters with the “other” (Muslims and Latins), revealing Kokkinos’ nuanced understanding of the threats and opportunities raised by these interactions. Finally, it makes the claim that through his saints’ lives Kokkinos offers models of identification and refuge in the troubled social and political context of fourteenth-century Byzantium, promoting a spiritual revival of society. As my dissertation shows, Kokkinos’ vitae of contemporary saints sought to shape and were shaped by the political and theological disputes of fourteenth-century Byzantium, especially those surrounding hesychasm. Their analysis offers insights into the thought-world of their author and sheds more light on the late-Byzantine religious and cultural context of their production. The dissertation is equipped with six technical appendices presenting the chronology of Kokkinos’ life and works, the narrative structure of his vitae of contemporary saints, a critical edition of the preface of his hitherto unedited Logos on All Saints (BHG 1617g), a transcription of two hitherto unedited prayers Kokkinos addressed to the emperors, the content of Marc. gr. 582 and Kokkinos’ autograph interventions, and manuscript plates.
A Byzantine Hagiographical Parody: The Life of Mary the Younger
In this paper, it is argued that The Life of Mary the Younger, an anonymous Byzantine text of the eleventh century, has a conscious intertextual dialogue with the oldest Byzantine Life venerating a holy woman, the Life of Macrina written by her brother, Gregory of Nyssa, between 380 and 383. The intertextual relation between these two female Lives takes the form of parody. Following Linda Hutcheon's theory of parody, this article shows how the anonymous hagiographer of Mary reworks Gregory's authoritative text to create a new work, a parody in terms of postmodern literary criticism, whose aim was to criticise old and contemporary customs, conventions and ideologies. In other words, the present article approaches and decodes the literariness, the function and ideology of Mary's Life in the light of Macrina's Life. Intertextuality, as the work of structuralists and poststructuralists has shown, constitutes the very condition of literature: every literary work is produced in accordance with or in opposition to other texts. 1 The notion of intertextuality, the network of texts, rests on the supposition that there is no original and no autonomous literary work. As Umberto Eco puts it in the Postscript to his famous novel The Name of the Rose, 'books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told'. 2 All literary works are constructed with discourses, conventions and ideologies established by previous texts which in turn constitute intertextual constructs.