Histoire de la Byzantie mineure (Studies in Byzantine History and Civilization 8)

Since 1959 Hans-Georg Beck’s Kirche und theologische Literatur im byzantinischen Reich has been the leading reference work for anyone studying
Byzantine theological literature. The reader of this book is faced, expecially in the latter half, with a single interpretive structure for the entire Byzantine period, from the Iconoclasm, through Photios up to the palamite controversy and the debate over the union of the Churches. According to this structure, all this material can be classified using a few labels, such as dogmatic and polemic, homiletic, ascetic and mystic, hagiographic, exegetic, hymnographic or as canon law.
Obviously this approach, which partly conformed to the editorial standards of the Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft series, favored only the most important Byzantine theological writers and works, i.e. those who easily fitted Beck’s “Theologie der Byzantiner”, a paradigm which only included the dogmatic and polemical literature, the panoplies, the anti-Latin or anti-heretic writings. Other texts, such as florilegia or collections of texts composed for specific purposes found no place within this narrative.
However, over the last years, following Marcel Richard’s seminal work, such texts have received growing attention, as witnessed by the projects of the Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes – Section grecque (Paris) and the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Recognising this renewed interest, the 22th annual conference of St. Tikhon’s Orthodox University of Moscow (21-22 November 2011) hosted a conference specifically devoted to theological texts and related literary genres that have so far been under-investigated as part of a project on the theology and religious history of Byzantium, organized in collaboration with the Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici, Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice.