Andrew Mellas – författare

The Cambridge Companion to the Byzantine Church explores the intricate dimensions of the Church in Byzantium-its emergence, theology, art, liturgy and histories-and its afterlife, in captivity and in the modern world. Thirty leading theologians and historians of eastern Rome examine how people from Greece to Russia lived out their faith in liturgies, veneration of the saints, and other dimensions of church life, including its iconic art and architecture. The authors provide a rich overview and insights from the latest scholarship on the lives and beliefs of emperors and subjects across the Byzantine empire. The volume thereby fills a prominent gap in current offerings on the development and continuing impacts of the Byzantine church from the fourth to fifteenth centuries, and will serve as a valuable resource for scholars, a companion for students and an introduction for the wider community to this fascinating chapter in the history of Christianity.

The Cambridge Companion to the Byzantine Church explores the intricate dimensions of the Church in Byzantium-its emergence, theology, art, liturgy and histories-and its afterlife, in captivity and in the modern world. Thirty leading theologians and historians of eastern Rome examine how people from Greece to Russia lived out their faith in liturgies, veneration of the saints, and other dimensions of church life, including its iconic art and architecture. The authors provide a rich overview and insights from the latest scholarship on the lives and beliefs of emperors and subjects across the Byzantine empire. The volume thereby fills a prominent gap in current offerings on the development and continuing impacts of the Byzantine church from the fourth to fifteenth centuries, and will serve as a valuable resource for scholars, a companion for students and an introduction for the wider community to this fascinating chapter in the history of Christianity.

This book explores the liturgical experience of emotions in Byzantium through the hymns of Romanos the Melodist, Andrew of Crete and Kassia. It reimagines the performance of their hymns during Great Lent and Holy Week in Constantinople. In doing so, it understands compunction as a liturgical emotion, intertwined with paradisal nostalgia, a desire for repentance and a wellspring of tears. For the faithful, liturgical emotions were embodied experiences that were enacted through sacred song and mystagogy. The three hymnographers chosen for this study span a period of nearly four centuries and had an important connection to Constantinople, which forms the topographical and liturgical nexus of the study. Their work also covers three distinct genres of hymnography: kontakion, kanon and sticheron idiomelon. Through these lenses of period, place and genre this study examines the affective performativity hymns and the Byzantine experience of compunction.