Ioannis Polemis – författare

An authoritative new Greek edition and English translation of the life of a notable Byzantine monastic leader.Saint Peter of Atroa (773–837 CE) was a Byzantine monastic leader, remembered primarily as cofounder and abbot of the influential monastery of Saint Zachariah at Atroa, below the holy mountain of Olympos in Bithynia. Peter sought to live in tranquility and solitude, traveling to the various monasteries he established in northwestern Asia Minor and occasionally joining other notable monastic figures. However, his resistance to the Iconoclast policies of imperial regimes in Constantinople during the first half of the ninth century led to his persecution and the temporary dispersal of his communities. Although he was evidently regarded with suspicion by some of his contemporaries, he gained a reputation as a miracle worker and his tomb became the site of a healing cult in the years after his death.The Life of Saint Peter of Atroa was written by the saint’s disciple Sabas, also the biographer for Peter’s contemporary and friend Saint Ioannikios, and it survives in two manuscript versions. This volume represents an entirely new edition of the Greek text, establishing the version previously regarded as secondary as the more important of the two, and making the Life accessible to English readers for the first time.

The statesman and scholar Theodore Metochites was one of the most important personalities of the fourteenth-century Byzantine Empire. A close advisor to the emperor Andronikos II and restorer of the famous monastery of Chora in Constantinople, Metochites left various writings including orations, poems, essays and commentaries on classical and religious texts, in which he discusses the numerous problems that troubled him and his contemporaries, such as the decline of the state and the tension between public life and that of the philosopher.In this book, Ioannis Polemis provides the first in-depth study of Metochites’ oeuvre, revealing the complex way he represented the authorial self to critique the politics and mores of his day, whilst at the same time shielding himself from potential criticism. Polemis details the way Metochites deftly manipulated figures and tropes from classical antiquity and early Christianity to justify his role in public life, which was traditionally shunned by scholars in the pursuit of ‘logos’. The book provides unique insights into one of the late Empire’s most important figures, as well as more widely deepening our understanding of classical reception in Byzantium and the social, political and intellectual climate of Constantinople in the fourteenth century.

The statesman and scholar Theodore Metochites was one of the most important personalities of the fourteenth-century Byzantine Empire. A close advisor to the emperor Andronikos II and restorer of the famous monastery of Chora in Constantinople, Metochites left various writings including orations, poems, essays and commentaries on classical and religious texts, in which he discusses the numerous problems that troubled him and his contemporaries, such as the decline of the state and the tension between public life and that of the philosopher.In this book, Ioannis Polemis provides the first in-depth study of Metochites’ oeuvre, revealing the complex way he represented the authorial self to critique the politics and mores of his day, whilst at the same time shielding himself from potential criticism. Polemis details the way Metochites deftly manipulated figures and tropes from classical antiquity and early Christianity to justify his role in public life, which was traditionally shunned by scholars in the pursuit of ‘logos’. The book provides unique insights into one of the late Empire’s most important figures, as well as more widely deepening our understanding of classical reception in Byzantium and the social, political and intellectual climate of Constantinople in the fourteenth century.

This is the first edition of ten Funeral Orations of Michael Psellos based on all the manuscripts preserving those works and accompanied by a full apparatus fontium and the necessary critical apparatus. Some of those texts had been published by the Greek scholar Konstantinos Sathas at the end of the XIX c. Those editions hardly correspond to the contemporary standards. The same applies to several more recent editions, prepared by P. Gautier, which also leave much to be desired.The most important texts of our collection are the funeral orations for the patriarchs Michael Keroullarios, Konstantinos Leichoudes and John Xiphilinos, a personal friend of Michael Psellos. All the texts offer valuable details concerning Psellos’s early life; at the same time they constitute an important testimony to the survival of the Late Antique Rhetoric in XI c. Byzantium. They constitute a necessary supplement to Psellos’s more famous work, his Chronography, verifying and shedding a new light on the events narrated there.

The edition will contain all the prose works of Theodore Metochites (XIV c.) contained in MS Vindobonensis phil. gr. 95. All the texts are rhetorical devoted to various subjects: except for the encomia for various saints, Metochites composed several treatises dealing with matters of secular education and some works refuting the works of his opponent, Nicephorus Choumnos. He also composed two orations for the emperor Andronikos II Palaiologos.