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Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > General > History of religion
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The Virgin in Song - Mary and the Poetry of Romanos the Melodist (Hardcover)
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The Virgin in Song - Mary and the Poetry of Romanos the Melodist (Hardcover)
Series: Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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According to legend, the Virgin appeared one Christmas Eve to an
artless young man standing in one of Constantinople's most famous
Marian shrines. She offered him a scroll of papyrus with the
injunction that he swallow it, and following the Virgin's command,
he did so. Immediately his voice turned sweet and gentle as he
spontaneously intoned his hymn "The Virgin today gives birth." So
was born the career of Romanos the Melodist (ca. 485-560), one of
the greatest liturgical poets of Byzantium, author of at least
sixty long hymns, or kontakia, that were chanted during the night
vigils preceding major feasts and festivals. In The Virgin in Song,
Thomas Arentzen explores the characterization of Mary in these
kontakia and the ways in which the kontakia echoed the cult of the
Virgin. He focuses on three key moments in her story as marked in
the liturgical calendar: her encounter with Gabriel at the
Annunciation, her child's birth at Christmas, and the death of her
son on Good Friday. Consistently, Arentzen contends, Romanos
counters expectations by shifting emphasis away from Christ himself
to focus on Mary-as the subject of the erotic gaze, as a
breastfeeding figure of abundance and fertility, and finally as an
authoritatively vocal woman who conveys the secrets of her son and
the joys of the resurrection. Through his hymns, Romanos inspired
an affective relationship between Mary and his audience, bringing
the human and the holy into dialogue. By plumbing her emotional
depths, the poet traces her process of understanding as she
apprehends the mysteries that she embodies. By giving her a
powerful voice, he grants subjectivity to a maiden who becomes a
mediator. Romanos shaped a figure, Arentzen argues, who related
intimately to her flock in a formative period of Christian
orthodoxy.
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