In 1066 a scribe and illustrator at the Stoudios Monastery named Theodore worked on a psalter, now in the British Library. Next to a verse about God raining down destruction from Psalm 20, he painted Sodom and Gomorrah engulfed in flames while Lot and his daughters flee and Lot’s wife is turns into a pillar of salt. Theodore had fled the sinful world to enter the monastery, like Lot leaving Sodom. But the monastery turned out to be riskier than he thought, no freer of the threat of male-male love. In the same scriptorium, not so many desks away, Niketas had edited Symeon’s works and composed his life. Theodore and his work were products of a monastic culture that held celibacy, homoeroticism, and the love God in a nearly untenable tension.

Scholars have noted that many of the surviving tablets from Dodona pose agriculturally related questions of a general manner. My essay suggests this is because agricultural resources were religiously framed in the ancient Greek world. In this context, I argue that oracles functioned as sites where material practices of daily life could be negotiated with the gods in a ritual as well as communal context. Oracles, in other words, presented a way of communicating with the natural world. On the other hand, they were also places where the individual could present himself (or herself) in relation to this world: how he or she depended on its fruits for survival; but also how he (or she) could make or remake the resources it had to offer so that it would flourish. As I want to show, this particular interrelationship between agricultural labour and oracular consultation relied as much on the performative act of enquiry as it did on practical knowledge. In order to illustrate these interconnections, the essay draws on recent trends in environmental history and in resilience studies. It will reconsider the ancient evidence of the Zeus Oracle at Dodona in light of these approaches.

This introduction to the volume explains the origin of these essays, which began as papers given at a workshop to support the development of the Virtual Reality Oracle, which created a virtual reality experience of visiting the ancient Greek oracle of Dodona. An ancient Greek oracular site comprised an encounter with ‘unknowing’: the sanctuary was a space to which visitors brought questions concerned with many different areas of their lives. In that respect, we also drew a parallel with the experience of those who ‘visit’, as researchers, an oracle about which little is certain. The essay then reflects on this process of research, to consider how in examining the way our historical subjects engage with the affordances of their environments, we, in turn, as historians, ourselves engage with the affordances of our historical evidence, using Bakhtin’s theory of the chronotope.

Focusing on the third-person formulation of many of the texts on the question tablets, and drawing on psychological and narratological research, this essay explores the mind-set of those who came to consult Zeus, asking if these texts reveal a sense of the self as fragmented in the face of crisis – which may also suggest how processes of consultation at an oracle could have provided psychological relief to pilgrims. Using analytical approaches from cognitive linguistics, this essay examines these texts for what they may reveal in terms of a cognitive blending of Viewpoints – both mortal and divine – aiding self-integration and, thus, decision making. Finally, this essay argues that awe in the face of the divine may have been a key component of the experience of consultation, with significant impacts on our brain and body.

Why is God as well as justice called the truth? How does truth relate to deserts and the conatus, to beauty, generosity and grace toward others and toward all beings – be they persons, animals, plants, species, econiches, ecosystems, and the monuments of nature and culture?

This chapter performs a careful reading of the entire text of John’s Confessio theologica in order to define the nature of John’s affective piety. This reading clarifies the historical record, which often only highlights selections from John’s Confessio theologica rather than systematically analyses the whole thing. The chapter details John’s affective prescriptions to his reader, and also uses manuscript evidence to show how these were particularly aimed at monastic readers in Fécamp’s network. The examination provided here will satisfy historians of emotion, who will be interested in the contours of devotional emotion in this eleventh-century context; it also provides a basis for the remaining analyses in the book.

Dodona lies in the northwest of Greece, south of Ioannina. It is situated in the midst of a lovely, peaceful green valley, overlooked by the twin peaks of Tomaros. Natural openings disrupt the rugged geomorphological relief and allow bilateral movements to and from Epirus’ hinterland areas and the coast. It is acclaimed by the ancient writers as the oldest oracle in ancient Greece, with researchers placing its origins as far back as the Bronze Age. The whole area is scattered with ruins, including an imposing theatre, the sanctuary and an acropolis enclosed by fortified walls, occupying an area of 164.659,43 m2.The aim of this paper is to contextualize the architectural development of the sanctuary of Dodona from prehistory till the first century BCE within a general overview of the sacred landscape. It aims to provide a synthesis of the architectural development of the temenos based on previous and recent excavation data. It argues that the transformation of the sanctuary of Dodona from a small open-air shrine to a pan-Epirote and pan-Hellenic cult centre seems to be associated with the urbanization of Epirus and the formation of an Epirotic identity.

This chapter examines the pervasiveness of John’s devotional method among his contemporary brethren at Fécamp. The chapter first demonstrates that the affective prescriptions contained in John's Confessio theologica were promoted and enforced by the various devotional media at Fécamp – in the library, in the liturgy, and in sermons. The chapter then explores the complex relationship between emotional reform and discipline, as such affective rhetoric seems to have played a dual role in the monastery, both emotionally connecting the monastic practitioner to his God and keeping him in line under his abbot. This chapter, therefore, unlike other studies of affective piety, shows how affectivity was not just about a devotee’s emotional empathy with the crucified Christ, but also about a monastic devotee’s Christ-like obedience. I break scholarly ground by enumerating the uses of affective piety particular to the Benedictine monastery of the eleventh century.