Olympia T Nelson

In the Komnenian epic-novella, the sea is a live metaphor for emotion. Unlike the land, the sea surges and changes, ebbs and flows, bringing favours and catastrophe. In a threnodic context—where the sea is also a liquid graveyard—the rhythmic roll and pitch of the sea reflect specific pathoi experienced by the characters. This paper explores the high emotionality of this maritime metaphor by identifying the range of feeling in Rhodanthe and Dosikles by Theodore Prodromos. The plot itself is entirely marine; but the oceanic backdrop is not only a necessary vehicle for travel (and mostly unwanted transportation) to foreign places but a cipher for the intense emotions felt by the characters. The paper analyses how Prodromos’s poem begins in medias res, as if we have jumped into the sea itself: immediately we are set at sea in a state of upheaval. The two protagonists, the lovers Rhodanthe and Dosikles, are held in captivity in a pirate attack on Rhodes. Through bewildering peripetiae, their adventures continue in the pirates’ homeland and they are caught up in a war between the pirates and the king of Pissa. Against a narrative of storms and shipwreck, the sea is both a source of anxiety for Dosikles and at the same time the channel by which he will ultimately reunite with Rhodanthe. The paper argues that the marine setting is not only crucial to the storyline but the development of character and historically significant poetic insight into emotion. The sea, I propose, provided the ideal literary medium for emotional outpouring thanks to its inherent instability, fickleness and volatility .

Nature in hagiographic literature is anything but a haven. The reason for going into the wilderness is to endure hardships rather than to enjoy some bucolic locus amoenus: ascetic practice is close to penance, where the rigours of solitary life encourage introspection, and where the hermit actively cultivates compunction to reach God.  This paper introduces another element in the ascetic austerity of voluntary exile in nature by concentrating on women who literally exposed themselves to the desert. In the life of Mary of Egypt, the saint has lost all her clothes by the time Zosimas meets her. Yet women in the Middle Ages were expected to be fertile and it was a source of shame to be barren; and so the choice to withdraw from a productive birth-giving role to arrive at isolation in a barren place proposes double transgressions of feminine stereotypes, where nature, as harsh as it is, provides a hallowed sequestration that trumps conventional gender roles.  The paper examines both hagiographical texts and visual art depicting Mary of Egypt, alongside Theoktiste of Lesbos. It suggests that while women's rapport with the infertile places is highly redemptive, salvation is paradoxically achieved by denial and embracing the abject—incurring degradation and ugliness—that is somewhat modelled around the paradigm of martyrdom.

This review examines Managing Emotion in Byzantium: Passions, Affects, and Imaginings (2022) edited by Susan Ashbrook Harvey and Margaret Mullett, a significant contribution to the field of the history of emotions and Byzantine studies. The collection of essays broadly supports a theory that emotions in Byzantium were socially and religiously functional; and with their various roles in practice, the emotions needed to be managed. All of the authors situate emotion in the context of lived experience and lead us to the conclusion that emotion was the subject of intense investment in Byzantine society. While the authors use rigorously philological methods, the study represents a new energy in Byzantine studies, which seeks to interpret how feeling was conditioned by the values and priorities of Byzantine society.

The curtain is a prominent symbol employed in Renaissance art, yet its significance as a metaphor is seldom discussed. This thesis examines the use of the curtain in three key contexts, arguing that it was a prominent metaphor that (i) gained meaning from a religious role, (ii) developed poetic value in secular Venetian art and (iii) became a dominant motif in funerary statuary for similarly poetic reasons. The first chapter considers the role of the curtain in iconic art in the light of Biblical archetypes, looking at examples of Madonna and Child imagery in relation to liturgical practice, where curtains are integral to the mysteries and performative efficacy of the religion. The second chapter considers the curtain in a secular context. Studying narrative pictures and portraiture, I suggest that the religious role of the curtain in guarding the most precious is carried forward into the secular realm where it strategically heightens qualities such as intimacy, the erotic and political discretion. Finally, the third part of this thesis will examine the catafalque style of the curtain in Venetian tombs, looking at the sculptural innovation of the parted curtain, often opened by two angels to display a gisant effigy. The thesis will follow a structure analogous to life rhythm, starting with the curtain at birth, then considering the curtain in the world of action, and finally drawing the ultimate curtain on life: death. The curtain sets up a liminal space between heaven and earth, decorum and freedom or life and death; and it achieves this agency through its woven nature as malleable barrier which is not fixed but organically responds to the energy of any given istoria.

How should we think about the story of Mary of Egypt in contemporary discourse? Known as the 'saint for the sexually sinful', I consider her complex character as a female desert saint and an ascetic navigating her personal path to redemption