Dumbarton Oaks Papers 74 (2020)
John S. Langdon and Stephen W. Reinert, “Speros Vryonis Jr. (1928–2019),” 1–7.
Abraham Terian, “Monastic Turmoil in Sixth-Century Jerusalem and the South Caucasus: The Letter of Patriarch John IV to Catholicos Abas of the Caucasian Albanians,” 9–39.
This rare document presents a vivid example of the post-Chalcedonian turmoil in sixth-century Jerusalem as well as in the churches of the southern Caucasus. Employing the historical influence of the Patriarchal See of Jerusalem, John IV (in office 575–594) attempts to draw Abas, the Catholicos of Caucasian Albania (in office 552–596), into the Chalcedonian camp by urging him to sever his ties with the neighboring Armenian Church—just as John himself had succeeded in purging the monasteries in his jurisdiction of their heretical Miaphysite Armenians. This is the first English translation of the document, critically introduced and amply annotated. The article includes the text, extant in a single Armenian manuscript, which itself is a miscellany containing nearly all the historical documents pertaining to the Armenian Church’s quests for church unity, first with Byzantium and then with Rome, kept at the Matenadaran in Erevan (M500, fol. 428r–35v, dated 1305). Abas is the recipient also of an earlier letter from Catholicos Yovhannēs II Gabełean of Armenia (in office 557–574), which alerts him of Nestorian/Chalcedonian infiltrations into the monastic establishments within his jurisdiction, reminds him of the credo-confessional tradition in which he stands, and urges him to chase out the intruders (translated as an addendum).
Coleman Connelly, “Continued Celebration of the Kalends of January in the Medieval Islamic East,” 41–65.
This article documents the celebration of the Kalends of January in the Islamic East through at least 1000 CE by mustering a diverse and mostly neglected collection of Arabic, Greek, Syriac, and Christian Palestinian Aramaic evidence. Communities of Melkites, or Arabic-speaking Orthodox Christians, from Syria to Iraq to what is now Uzbekistan preserved this ancient Roman festival celebrated on 1 January. Muslims—and perhaps Byzantine Greek émigrés as well—participated in a more limited fashion. My survey demonstrates a remarkable continuity in the festival’s customs between late antiquity and the Islamic Middle Ages. At the same time, it also affords a glimpse at its changing social significance. While in Roman late antiquity and in medieval Byzantium, the Kalends were and remained a markedly secular affair, I document a gradual Christian “sacralization” of this folk holiday in the medieval Islamic East. I argue that as Melkite Christians became increasingly a social and numeric minority population, the Kalends took on new, unexpected meaning as an expression of Orthodox identity.
Victoria Gerhold, “The Legend of Euphratas: Some Notes on Its Origins, Development, and Significance,” 67–123.
This study focuses on Euphratas, a fictional character who occupies an important place in the Byzantine legend of Constantine the Great. Despite his widespread presence in Middle and Late Byzantine sources, Euphratas’s origins, literary development, and symbolic dimension remain elusive and call for reconsideration. This article systematizes and discusses the existing evidence concerning this figure and proposes an explanation of the role that his legend was meant to play in Byzantine Constantinople.
Christos Simelidis, “Two Lives of the Virgin: John Geometres, Euthymios the Athonite, and Maximos the Confessor,” 125–59.
This article argues that the Georgian Life of the Virgin Mary was not translated from a supposedly lost Greek Life (whether by Maximοs the Confessor or not), but from the Life of the Virgin written by John Geometres in the tenth century. Recent debates about the Georgian Life’s provenance have been based on unfounded assumptions that have never been critically examined. In these debates, the literary profiles of John Geometres and Euthymiοs the Athonite (the Georgian translator) have largely been ignored, and this article examines them in detail. Contrary to scholarly opinion, the Life of the Virgin by Geometres is not a copy of an allegedly lost original, but an original composition consistent with the literary style and skill displayed in the rest of Geometres’ writings. Moreover, Euthymiοs’s background, resources, literary and translation practices show that the Georgian Life can only be understood as a Euthymian version of Geometres’ text. In his working methods, Euthymios was almost certainly inspired by the metaphrastic practices of his age. The article demonstrates how convergent Geometres’, Symeon Metaphrastes’, and Euthymios’s lives and intellectual communities were—they may literally have known or at least met one another. Eliminating a precursor to Geometres’ Life not only opens the Life up to the objective scrutiny that its literary mastery deserves, but it also removes a major obstacle to our understanding of the evolution of Byzantine devotion to the Virgin.
Georgios Makris, “Living in Turbulent Times: Monasteries, Settlements, and Laypeople in Late Byzantine Southwest Thrace,” 161–83.
Thrace is perhaps best known for the Byzantine metropolis that was founded on its easternmost edge, Constantinople. Despite its proximity to the imperial capital, however, the region remains one of the least investigated regions of the Balkans. Thrace provides an attractive research context in which to examine the changes in the social and economic life of the empire over the long term, primarily because it did not witness a noticeable waning of imperial authority until the Ottoman advance in Europe. Due to the disparate source material, the interpretation of the Thracian landscape requires an interdisciplinary methodology that combines written sources with evidence from excavation work and in situ study of settlement remains and their setting. Historical and archaeological investigation of southwest Thrace can help us answer questions about conceptions of land ownership, the distribution and layout of settlements, and social composition in the Late Byzantine period. In situating the local people—primarily from the upper levels of society—in their lived spaces, this study also considers the local elites’ interactions with other powerful political and institutional authorities such as the emperor and successful Athonite monasteries.
Philipp Niewöhner, “The Significance of the Cross before, during, and after Iconoclasm: Early Christian Aniconism in Constantinople and Asia Minor,” 185–242.
This article asks how and why the cross became less popular than the icon. The cross used to be the most important symbol of all Christendom, until the icon and its veneration set Orthodox Christianity apart. This happened as a result of Byzantine Iconoclasm, when in the eighth and ninth centuries icons were substituted for crosses and vice versa. Afterwards, the victorious party, which favored the icon, blamed the adherents of the cross for starting the dispute, destroying icons, and replacing them with crosses. However, this paper finds that in Constantinople and Asia Minor—i.e., in the capital and the heartland of the Byzantine Empire—early Christian church decoration had always been focused on the symbol of the cross and excluded the kind of figural image that was at issue during Iconoclasm. Iconoclasm appears to have been less about the destruction of icons and more about the import of image veneration to Constantinople and Asia Minor, where—contrary to other provinces of the late antique empire—such had not been customary in early Christian times. Ultimately, Iconoclasm and the displacement of the cross seem to have been due to the seventh-century collapse of the Eastern Roman empire, when most formerly icon-venerating provinces were lost to Byzantine rule. The remaining Byzantine rump state was apparently too small to accommodate the various early Christian traditions—iconic in some provinces and essentially aniconic in others, notably in Constantinople and Asia Minor.
Stefania Gerevini, “Art as Politics in the Baptistery and Chapel of Sant’Isidoro at San Marco, Venice,” 243–68.
This article addresses questions of artistic diversity and political identity in the late medieval Mediterranean through analysis of the visual programs of the Baptistery and Chapel of St. Isidore in the basilica of San Marco, Venice. The two rooms were embellished with extensive mosaic cycles during the dogate of Andrea Dandolo (r. 1343–1354), and have been described as “the great enigma of Trecento art in Venice” on account of their ostensible juxtaposition of contemporary Byzantine and western visual elements. Moving away from binary approaches to artistic interaction, this article attends to the nexus between aesthetics and politics by examining the two cycles and their composite visual language in the context of the increased geopolitical instability of the Mediterranean in the mid-fourteenth century, and in relation to the important political challenges that Venice faced on the international stage at this time.
Laura Pfuntner, “Between Science and Superstition: Photius, Diodorus Siculus, and ‘Hermaphrodites’,” 269–83.
This article sheds light on how Photius’s Bibliotheca served as a bridge between ancient Greco-Roman and Byzantine intellectual traditions. It takes as a case study the excerpts from book 32 of Diodorus Siculus’s Historical Library with which Photius opens codex 244: lengthy accounts of two individuals who were identified as female at birth but later developed male genitalia and, with the assistance of surgery, lived as men. It argues that Photius was a sophisticated and critical reader of Diodorus whose editorial choices reflect a wide range of scientific, social, political, and theological concerns. Here, in keeping with his interest in the study and practice of medicine, Photius is most interested in Diodorus’s attempt to explain hermaphrodites as natural phenomena, which involved detailed descriptions of the surgeries they underwent to confirm their “true” sex. In the background to his editorial choice are broader concerns about individuals of ambiguous gender, such as eunuchs, and their cultural, political, and religious roles in Byzantium. In such a context, Diodorus’s argument against the existence of true “dual sexuals” could help Photius and his readers build a scientific as well as a theological basis for confirming the separate nature of the male and the female, thereby affirming traditional gender roles.
Baukje van den Berg, “John Tzetzes as Didactic Poet and Learned Grammarian,” 285–302.
This article takes various little-studied scholarly and didactic works by the twelfth-century grammarian John Tzetzes as its starting point for studying the didactic rationale governing his work. Tzetzes was one of the most prolific producers of didactic verse as it flourished in the twelfth century, and his didactic poems are a rich source of information on his teacherly persona and his ideas on grammar teaching. These ideas further show themselves in various polemical passages in which Tzetzes criticizes other grammarians, and schedographers more specifically, for their ignorance of the rules of prosody. The article therefore also explores what these criticisms reveal on the subject of what, in Tzetzes’ opinion, makes for a good grammarian and why it is imperative to learn the rules of grammar.
Matthew Kinloch, “In the Name of the Father, the Husband, or Some Other Man: The Subordination of Female Characters in Byzantine Historiography,” 303–28.
This paper explores the discursive production of gender in Byzantine historiography through the systematic examination of female characters in the Chronike syngraphe (Χρονικὴ συγγραφή) of George Akropolites, a thirteenth-century historiographical narrative. Through the analysis of this gendered subset of characters, this article aims to lay the foundations for a gendered grammar of Byzantine historiographical narrative by identifying and explicating some (although by no means all) of the basic gendered dynamics that structure the production of female characters in the Chronike syngraphe. The identification of these dynamics—understood here as heuristics rather than universal rules—is not, however, the principal aim of this paper. That aim is rather to produce an alternative framework for the gendered analysis of Byzantine historiography capable of sustaining a queer alternative to the now hegemonic mimetic reconstruction of elite women’s histories, which have monopolized and appropriated the sign of gender in Byzantine studies. This involves destabilizing the referential quality of the characters of Byzantine historiography, denaturalizing the textual construction of gender and sex, and exposing the elitism of modern women’s histories of Byzantium.
László Levente, “Rhetorius, Zeno’s Astrologer, and a Sixth-Century Astrological Compendium,” 329–50.
Rhetorius of Egypt, who supposedly lived in the sixth or early seventh century, is held to have been the author of an astrological compendium, of which only incomplete epitomes and excerpts have survived. In this article, these remnants are reexamined, and a new hypothesis, which attributes the compendium to the emperor Zeno’s anonymous astrologer, is provided.
Stig Simeon R. Frøyshov, “The Early History of the Hagiopolitan Daily Office in Constantinople: New Perspectives on the Formative Period of the Byzantine Rite,” 351–82.
This article aims at a better understanding of the process in which the Daily Office of Jerusalem reached Constantinople and increased in use and importance until it became the dominant Daily Office of the capital and the empire. It rejects the reigning paradigm, according to which Theodore and his flock brought a Palestinian Daily Office to Constantinople, settling at Stoudios in 798, after which it continued as the “monastic office” of Constantinople, in contradistinction to the people’s “cathedral office” of Hagia Sophia. It argues that the Jerusalem Daily Office arrived considerably earlier: no later than the first half of the seventh century, perhaps the sixth century. Until the ninth century it constituted a non-public liturgy whose context was the Great Palace, as shown by numerous court hymnographers, and no doubt some pious foundations and monasteries. Gradually, the Jerusalem (termed Hagiopolitan in Constantinople) Daily Office entered even patriarchal circles, and by the middle of the ninth century, it had acquired the status of canonical rite in the patriarchate of Constantinople, which in that way became bi-ritual. From then on, more and more public churches of Constantinople adopted the Hagiopolitan Daily Office.
“Processions: Urban Ritual in Byzantium and Neighboring Lands Dumbarton Oaks Symposium, 12–13 April 2019,” 383–84.