Liturgy and the Emotions in Byzantium

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.

• The first diachronic exploration of compunction as an emotion in Byzantium, appealing to scholars of liturgy, history and religion
• Shows how the hymns by Romanos the Melodist, Andrew of Crete and Kassia came to life in the liturgical and emotive universe of Byzantium
• Reveals new insights into Byzantine hymns, drawing on the history of emotions and performativity, and showing how compunction was experienced as an embodied and liturgical passion