Theological and Philological Learnedness. Hymns in Byzantine Educational and Scholarly Contexts (9th – 15th Centuries), Austrian Academy of Sciences, May 23–24, 2024
Every corpus of literature has its own group of authoritative texts, which in due course enter educational settings, give rise to exegetical traditions, and shape the intellectual life of the specific culture to which they belong in a multitude of ways. In Byzantium, this was the case not only with the ancient Greek classics, the Bible, and prominent patristic works (such as the orations of Gregory of Nazianzus), but also with specific liturgical hymns. The present workshop explores erudite Byzantine texts on hymns (scholia, commentaries, paraphrases, lexica), as well as the pervasive presence of liturgical poetry in Byzantine didactic, artistic, and scholarly contexts.