In this Thematic Session we would like to offer a review of the new perspectives of research dealing with the liturgical and hymnographic texts recorded between the 15th and 17th centuries (either manuscripts or printed books), as well as with those created outside the geographic centers of the Byzantine culture. On the one hand, the fall of Constantinople coincided with the beginning of book printing, which gave a new impulse to the diffusion of the liturgical and hymnographic texts, such as the Greek books printed in the Republic of Venice. On the other hand, an intense activity of translating and disseminating of liturgical manuscripts was developed in the Great Duchy of Muscovy, mainly during the 17th century. And on the territory of the neighboring Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth the first Ruthenian printed books were published in 1491 by Schweipolt Fiol in Kraków: these were four Orthodox liturgical books. Later, in 1522 Belarusian scholar Francysk Skaryna published the so-called “Little Traveller’s Book”, a collection that contained a number of liturgical texts written in Church Slavonic. In 1604 Gedeon Balaban, bishop of Lviv, published the Liturgicon, the result of his cooperation with St Meletius Pegas, Patriarch of Alexandria and locum tenens of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. Finally, between 1610 and 1640 a large-scale project of revising and retranslating liturgical books was conducted at the Kyivan Caves Monastery by Pamvo Berynda and St Petro Mohyla, among others. To sum up, we will address different research questions from a liturgical, textological, translation, literary, and cultural perspectives.
The priest Ioannis Morezinos (mid-16th – early 17th century) became known primarily through the studies of Eleni Kakoulidi, as well as through the publication of his poetic work Klinē Solomōntos (The Bed of Solomon, ed. E. Kakoulidi-Panou, E. Karatzola, M. Chalvatzidaki). Morezinos emerges as a cultivated figure, not only as the owner of an impressive…
Since the earliest creation of Slavic liturgical service codices, excerpts from various apocryphal texts had been inserted in the daily or festal menaia, or even in homiliaries, receiving an equivalent canonical status to other gospel texts. The paper presents some of the earliest examples of inclusion of apocrypha in liturgical readings and homiliaries, paying special…
My paper explores the Byzantine legacy in the medieval Orthodox Slavic written culture and the subsequent appreciation of the original Slavonic works, based on Byzantine examples, by the later Eastern Slavonic bookmen. It focuses on one of the most significant cultural and political figures of the late medieval Orthodox Christian tradition—Gregory Tsamblak, a Kyivan Metropolitan…
The history of Slavic monastic collections is still unclear and has to be reconstructed with the help of small details. One of these elements is the mention of new services and saints in typica. A typicon is a liturgical book containing instructions about the order of the Byzantine Rite office and variable hymns of the…
The paper considers the changes in the number and functions of the prayers and in the liturgical directions in the rite for the fortieth day after the childbirth in Slavonic Euchologia (Trebninks) as compared to Greek manuscripts and printed books. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a relatively stable configuration of prayers and instructions for…
Recent scholarship on Post-Byzantine Greek and Slavonic liturgical and hymnographic texts has entered a period of significant renewal, marked by the adoption of interdisciplinary methodologies and the integration of digital, historical, and cultural perspectives. Moving beyond the traditional boundaries of textual philology and ecclesiastical history, contemporary research now views these texts as vital expressions of…