Abstract
This book examines ideas of spiritual nourishment as maintained chiefly by Patristic theologians—those who lived in Byzantium. It shows how a particular type of Byzantine frescoes and icons illustrated the views of Patristic thinkers on the connections between the heavenly and the earthly worlds. The author explores the occurrence and geographical distribution of this new type of iconography that manifested itself in representations concerned with the human body, and argues that these were a reaction to docetist ideas. The volume also investigates the diffusion of saints’ cults and demonstrates that this took place on a North-South axis as their veneration began in Byzantium and gradually reached the northern part of Europe, and eventually the entire Christianity.
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Notes
- 1.
Daniel F. Callahan, “Ademar of Chabannes and the Bogomils” and Bernard Hamilton “Bogomil Influences on Western Heresy”, in Michael Frassetto (ed.), Heresy and the Persecuting Society in the Middle Ages: Essays on the Work of R.I. Moore, Brill Leiden, 2006; M. Frassetto, Heretic Lives: Medieval Heresy from Bogomil and the Cathars to Wyclif and Hus, London: Profile, 2007; Averil Cameron, “How to Read Heresiology”, in the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33, no. 3, 2003, pp. 471–492.
- 2.
Averil Cameron, The Byzantines, Oxford: Blackwell, 2006, p. 16.
- 3.
Edward Gibbon, “Introduction. Notes to the second edition”, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. I, 1776; London: Strahan & Cadell, second edition 1814, vol. 1, p. xxxvi.
- 4.
Peter Brown, “Eastern and Western Christendom in Late Antiquity”, pp. 2–3.
- 5.
Averil Cameron, The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity; AD 395–600, New York, London: Routledge, 1993, p. 71.
- 6.
The Greek, respectively Slavonic terms for “Anne nursing/breastfeeding”.
- 7.
In the case of San Marco in Venice, the sculpture representing St. Anne—and perhaps a mosaic too—might be dated to the eleventh century; in the absence of written documents, we will present the circumstantial evidence that supports this hypothesis.
- 8.
Bogomilism is a Gnostic sect founded in the First Bulgarian Empire during the reign of Tsar Peter I in the tenth century. It most probably arose in what is today the region of Macedonia as a response to the social stratification specific to the medieval society and as a form of political movement and opposition to the Bulgarian state and the Church. Among their ideas, which will be introduced in some detail in the main text of this book, the Bogomils called for a return to early Christianity, rejecting the Church hierarchy.
- 9.
Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages, Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1984 (first edition 1982).
- 10.
Selbritt is the representation (as statues or, rarely, paintings) of Anne, Mary as an adult, and Christ as a child or adolescent.
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Ene D-Vasilescu, E. (2018). Introduction. In: Heavenly Sustenance in Patristic Texts and Byzantine Iconography. New Approaches to Byzantine History and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98986-0_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98986-0_1
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