Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies at Edinburgh University

During 13–15 April 2018, I attended the 51^st Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies dedicated to The Post-1204 Byzantine World: New Approaches and Novel Directions at the University of Edinburgh. During the conference, I served as chair for the panel "Into the Mid Fourteenth Century" and gave a communication on "Parents in Pain: Literary Expressions of Grief in Philotheos Kokkinos’ Vitae of Contemporary Saints."

Abstract

Philotheos Kokkinos (ca. 1300–1378), a native of Thessalonike, student of (worldly) rhetoric, and Athonite monk with a distinguished ecclesiastical career, gracing twice the patriarchal throne of Constantinople, is the most prolific and arguably most gifted Palaiologan hagiographer. He composed numerous lives of saints, five of which dedicated to contemporary figures (Nikodemos the Younger, Sabas the Younger, Germanos Maroules, Isidore Boucheir, and Gregory Palamas). In these vitae, Kokkinos offers poignant depictions of sorrow and emotional distress in the face of illness and the threat of death, the most touching of which are the ones of parents faced with the suffering and death of their children. This paper investigates literary expressions of grief in Kokkinos’ vitae of contemporary saints, especially in the miracle accounts, looking at gender variations in the depiction of parents’ attitudes towards the threat of (or actually) losing a child. Kokkinos captures a broad range of parental emotional reactions to the danger of a child’s death, ranging from despair to reclusiveness, as well as resignation and acceptance. One miracle account in the vita dedicated to Germanos conveys particularly well the psychological torment and frantic efforts of a father to save his son from the grips of a life-threatening fever. Seeing the condition of his son aggravate by the day, he travels to Germanos and falls at his feet, begging him with tears and a great display of emotion (peripatheia) to cure the child. The paper will also inquire into the functions of such emotionally charged episodes into Kokkinos’ hagiographical accounts.

Last modified: Wed, 05 Feb 2020 16:10:17 GMT