Beyond Religion: Homilies as Conveyor of Political Ideology in Middle Byzantium (original) (raw)

The paper focusses on a specific group of religious literary texts, namely homilies, in order to investigate whether they transmitted political ideology. In particular, it deals with Middle Byzantine homilies from just before the beginning of Iconoclasm to 1204. This is not an exhaustive study of such a vast subject, but an examination of certain aspects of it. Following some preliminary remarks, the issues under consideration are: 1. The expression of criticism of or opposition to the emperor, whether explicit or ex silentio; 2. The positive expression of political, more specifically imperial ideology on the basis of a few significant homiletic examples from the Byzantine capital at the highest level of church and state; 3. Homilies in the Byzantine tradition as a medium of political-ideological correctness outside of the empire (the case of Philagathos Kerameus); and 4. The analysis of a homily that bridges the two worlds, the Byzantine and the Norman, in another way, by presenting Norman political ideology from the point of view of a Byzantine preacher.