This panel aims to map out oral-performativity in and around Byzantium as an essential component to knowledge of Byzantine cultures, Greek or non-Greek. Walter J. Ong (1912-2003) revolutionized historical disciplines by introducing the concept of orality as a hermeneutical key replacing the dangerous, colonialist category of the “primitive” that gave Western observers a vantage from which to appraise other people who were geographically or temporally alien. Ong’s concept of orality undoubtedly suits a description of Byzantium as a society where few had access to reading and writing and where books remained the prerogative of elites. But the oral mode can remain unhelpfully abstract. In this group of six papers by both established scholars and doctoral candidates, oral culture in Constantinople and other Byzantine spheres of influence – notably, Coptic Egypt, Palestine, and Armenia – is coupled with the discovery of a pervasive performance modality through which texts were continuously re-interpreted and made available to a larger public in different forms. While literate Byzantium has overwhelmingly occupied scholars, this panel addresses manuscripts, texts, images, and music by revealing their performative potential. The ways in which God’s Word is not only studied or heard but feasted and performed, like a true spectacle of sons et lumières, is highlighted in both cathedral and monastic ritual contexts.
The sources for the ritual of the Forum of Constantine on 1 September in the eleventh century are Gospel lectionaries made for the patriarchate or copied from such manuscripts and an euchologion (Paris, BnF Coislin 213) by someone associated with Hagia Sophia, as well as the earlier Typikon of the Great Church. While these sources…
Studied most recently by Daniel Galadza, the so-called Typikon of the Anastasis (MS Jerusalem, Hagios Stavros 43, dated 1122) contains texts and rubrics for services for the Church of Jerusalem during the seasons of Lent and Easter, representing the final stages of the Holy City’s distinct local urban rite. By cross-referencing the contents of the…
In the typikon of Paulos of Evergetis, it is stated that Metaphrastic lives were to be read aloud at orthros services on 148 days of the year. Such oral deliverance would put quite serious demands on the monastic programme, with single texts sometimes running into almost 100 pages in modern editions. Together with other educational…