Vasileios Marinis - Böcker

The martyr Euphemia, a young woman who was put to death in 303 CE in Chalcedon, was one of the most popular saints in Byzantium. In addition to the complex dedicated to her in that city, consisting of a large basilica and an attached circular martyrium, there existed at least six more churches dedicated to her in Constantinople. Her hagiographical dossier is equally impressive. It includes texts that span from the fourth to the fifteenth century, and belong to such diverse genres as ekphrasis, passio, and enkomion. Euphemia was also present in crucial moments of Byzantine religious history, including the Council of Chalcedon in 451, the Persian attacks in the seventh century, and Iconoclasm. Given Euphemia's historical importance and the plethora of available literary as well as archaeological and artistic material, it is surprising that there has not been a comprehensive study of her cult in Byzantium. This book aims to remedy this situation by placing every major aspect of Euphemia's cult within a wider social, historical, and ritual context. Methodologically, it views Euphemia not as a historical personality, but as a literary, theological, and artistic construct, best understood as a hagiographical heuristic that was used (and abused) by a variety of interested groups. By emphasizing a hermeneutic approach to the discourse and representation of sanctity, this book aims to reconcile the reception of Euphemia's cult with its creation.

This book examines the interchange of architecture and ritual in the Middle and Late Byzantine churches of Constantinople (ninth to fifteenth centuries). It employs archaeological and archival data, hagiographic and historical sources, liturgical texts and commentaries, and monastic typika and testaments to integrate the architecture of the medieval churches of Constantinople with liturgical and extra-liturgical practices and their continuously evolving social and cultural context. The book argues against the approach that has dominated Byzantine studies: that of functional determinism, the view that architectural form always follows liturgical function. Instead, proceeding chapter by chapter through the spaces of the Byzantine church, it investigates how architecture responded to the exigencies of the rituals, and how church spaces eventually acquired new uses. The church building is described in the context of the culture and people whose needs it was continually adapted to serve. Rather than viewing churches as frozen in time (usually the time when the last brick was laid), this study argues that they were social constructs and so were never finished, but continually evolving.

For all their reputed and professed preoccupation with the afterlife, the Byzantines had no systematic conception of the fate of the soul between death and the Last Judgement. Death and the Afterlife in Byzantium marries for the first time liturgical, theological, literary, and material evidence to investigate a fundamental question: what did the Byzantines believe happened after death? This interdisciplinary study provides an in-depth analysis and synthesis of hagiography, theological treatises, apocryphal texts and liturgical services, as well as images of the fate of the soul in manuscript and monumental decoration. It also places the imagery of the afterlife, both literary and artistic, within the context of Byzantine culture, spirituality, and soteriology. The book intends to be the definitive study on concepts of the afterlife in Byzantium, and its interdisciplinary structure will appeal to students and specialists from a variety of areas in medieval studies.

"Studies in Iconography" is an annual journal hosted by the Index of Medieval Art and published in partnership with Medieval Institute Publications. It presents innovative work on the meaning of images from the medieval world broadly construed, between the fourth century to the year 1600.