This session proposal intends to develop research first carried out in the pioneering volume “Religious Rhetorical of Power in Byzantium and South-Eastern Europe”, BIESEE 15 (Braila-Bucharest, 2021) edited by Ivan Biliarsky, Mihail Mitrea, and Andrei Timotin. The research is concerned not only with rhetoric in the strict sense of the art of persuasive discourse, but also with rhetoric as a means of expression used for the purpose of persuasion by an individual or a group. This rhetoric is “religious” when the content of this mean of expression belongs to the religious field. The contributors to this session examine the complex relationships between rhetoric and various forms of power in Byzantine society and beyond Byzantium, in its political and cultural orbit (e.g. in the Medieval Slavic and Romanian worlds), including imperial power and local authorities. The focus is on a number of literary genres: hagiography, historiography, panegyrics and chronicles. As rhetoric is not just written or spoken discourse and there is also a “visual rhetoric”, the session also includes two papers dealing with visual rhetoric in Byzantine and South-East European art.
The conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans had an indelible impact on the collective consciousness of the Byzantines and of the Christians in general. Yet, as has often been emphasised, Constantine XI’s presence is rather low in practically all the contemporary Greek writings devoted to the ‘catastrophe’, and almost nothing is said about the imperial…
Cette Vie, curieusement assez peu étudiée, décrit la carrière étonnante d’un patriarche de Constantinople au VIe s. : nommé par Justinien contre toute attente pour mener à bien le concile des Trois Chapitres en 552, Eutychios est déposé par le même Justinien en 565 pour avoir refusé de souscrire à l’aphtartodocétisme de l’empereur. Quand son…
The Exodus narrative frames the transmission of the law to the prophet Moses as an encounter with a corporeal manifestation of the invisible divinity. Having descended on Mount Sinai, God molds his ineffable presence into an epiphanic body. It is through this anthropomorphic envelope that the Lord seals the covenant with the elect nation by…
This paper considers the role of religious rhetoric in late Byzantine literature of resistance against the expanding Ottoman Empire. Drawing upon fifteenth-century siege accounts by authors like John Kananos, Demetrios Chrysoloras, John Anagnostes, and Gennadios Scholarios, it argues that as the military and political power of the Byzantine state waned, religious discourse became a tool…