Eternal Victory (original) (raw)
Performing the Gospels in Byzantium: Sight, Sound, and Space in the Divine Liturgy, 2021
Tracing the Gospel text from script to illustration to recitation, this study looks at how illuminated manuscripts operate within ritual and architecture. Focusing on a group of richly illuminated lectionaries from the late-eleventh century, the book articulates how the process of textual recitation produced marginalia and miniatures that reflected and subverted the manner in which the Gospel was read and simultaneously imagined by readers and listeners alike. This unique approach to manuscript illumination points to images that slowly unfolded in the mind of its listeners as they imagined the text being recited, as meaning carefully changes and builds as the text proceeds. By emplacing this process in specific acoustic architectural spaces and the sonic conditions of medieval chant, the volume demonstrates how images, texts, and recitation played with the environment of the Middle Byzantine church. This deeply historical work brings together the concerns of sound studies, liturgical studies, and art history to demonstrate how text, image, and sound work together in the Divine Liturgy, cutting across traditional disciplinary boundaries.