Tears of Compunction in Byzantine Hymnody: The Hymnography of Romanos the Melodist, Andrew of Crete and Kassia

Abstract

This thesis explores the Byzantine experience of the emotion of compunction through the hymns of Romanos the Melodist (c. 490–560), Andrew of Crete (c. 660–740) and Kassia (c. 810–865). It reimagines the performance of their compunctious hymns, which were sung during the liturgical cycle of Great Lent and Holy Week in Constantinople. In doing so, it understands compunction in Byzantium as a liturgical emotion, intertwined with paradisal nostalgia, a desire for repentance and a wellspring of tears. For the Byzantine faithful, this emotion was not merely an ideational construct, but also an embodied experience that was enacted through sacred song and liturgical mysticism. The three hymnographers chosen for this study span a period of nearly four centuries and all had an important connection to Constantinople, which forms the topographical and liturgical nexus of the thesis. Their work also covers three distinct genres of Byzantine hymnography—kontakion, kanon and sticheron idiomelon—and Kassia is the only known female author whose poetry appears in Eastern Christendom’s hymnals. Through these lenses of period, place, genre, and gender, this dissertation examines what we can know of the affective performativity of the Byzantine experience of compunction.

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