Tsironi, Niki, ed. 2025. “Emotion and Performance in Late Antiquity and Byzantium." Special issue, Classics@ 24. https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HLNC.JISSUE:104135626.
This volume reflects the outcomes of an international symposium held in April 2021, itself the result of a research project launched in 2016 that aimed to unravel the hidden codes embedded in performance and performativity within the written and visual sources of the Late Antique and Byzantine periods. The contributions encompass a broad spectrum of interests in cultural history. The interplay among various aspects of Byzantine cultural history is evident in these papers, which address texts, theology and liturgy, music, art, and modern interpretations, alongside the expression of performativity in everyday life in Byzantium. This project and conference extend the scope of performativity beyond theatrical representation, examining indirect performative forms found in written and art-historical records. Moreover, they investigate how emotion is elicited in both secular and sacred rhetorical texts and performances, particularly as manifested in the Liturgy and the homiletic tradition, characterized by intense emotions that engage and transport audiences beyond their everyday concerns.
– from the Introduction
Table of Contents
- “Introduction. Emotion and Performance in Late Antiquity and Byzantium,”
Niki Tsironi - “Notes Towards a Performance Typology of Poetic Scholia,”
Andrew Walker White - “Performance Issues in the Christos paschon,”
Margaret Mullett - “The Body as Ritual Space: St Maximos the Confessor’s Mystagogy and the Architecture of Deification,”
Maximos Constas - “The Notion of Performance in the Liturgical Commentaries of Symeon of Thessalonica,”
Damaskinos Olkinuora - “Performing Orthodoxy in Byzantine Hymnography: Romanos the Melodist’s On the Three Children,”
Sarah Gador-Whyte - “Performance, Relic, Poem: Ephrem’s Hymns on Saints,”
Jeffrey Wickes - “Performing the Bible at Dura: A Panel of Elijah and the Widow of Sarepta as tableau vivant,”
Barbara Crostini - “Performative Colors in Late Antique Eikones,”
Katherine Marsengill - “The Function of Dialogues in Byzantine Religious Imagery,”
Eirini Panou - “Mosaic and Mimesis: The Eikōn tou Theou and Models of Katanyxis in the Middle Byzantine Church,”
Bissera V. Pentcheva - “Performance and Subjectivity in an Illustrated Psalter: Vatican gr. 1927,”
Nicolette Trahoulia - “Performativity and Theatricality in Palaiologan Iconography: The Composition of the Temptations of Christ in the Chora Monastery,”
Nectarios Zarras - “Performativity of Old Testament Verses: Proverbs (9:1–6) in the Liturgy and Church Decoration in the Late Medieval Balkans,”
Marka Tomić - “The Unbearable Brokenness of Artifacts: Dining Utensils as Social Markers of Performance in the Byzantine World (ca. seventh-fifteenth centuries).”
Joanita Vroom - “From the Oral Tradition to Written Music and Vice Versa: How the Performance of Byzantine Church Music Gives Rise to Different Identity Practices,”
Gordana Blagojević - “Affective Affinities in Eastern Mediterranean Poetry and Music: An Online Performance,”
Michalis Cholevas, Andrew Watson, and Anna Apostolidou - “Cassia’s ‘Woman of Many Sins’: From the Two-Dimensional to the Three-Dimensional Interpretation of Byzantine Poetry,”
Katia Savrami