First ever critical edition of the corpus of forty-two Homilies
by the Byzantine Emperor Leo VI the Wise (A.D. 886-912). The
Homilies are highly rhetorical compositions and consist of
panegyrics on ecclesiastical feasts and discourses on special
occasions. They are gathered together here for the first time.
Thirty-four texts were previously published in inadequate,
antiquated and/or inaccessible editions. Another three remained
unpublished. The critical edition of these important works of the
emperor-scholar of the "Macedonian Renaissance" makes them easily
accessible, responding to a desideratum of Byzantine Studies.
The edition is preceded by an original, full-length introduction
on the extensive manuscript tradition of the Homilies divided into
five chapters. The first four provide a solid investigation of the
more than a hundred surviving codices that contain the Homilies,
and elaborate on their relationship to each other. The final
chapter presents the editorial principles. The establishment of the
text according to the modern requirements of textual criticism is
accompanied by a detailed critical apparatus as well as an
apparatus of sources and significant parallel passages. A series of
indices completes the work.
The book will appeal to specialists and students of Byzantine
literature and civilization, philologists, historians, theologians
and art historians alike, as well as specialists in patristic and
medieval homiletics, classicists interested in the survival of the
ancient Greek rhetorical and literary tradition, and linguists
studying the Greek language in its medieval period. The texts can
be used as teaching material at both graduate and undergraduate
levels.
Theodora Antonopoulou is Associate Professor of Byzantine
Literature at the University of Athens, Greece.