Sacred Shivering

Abstract

Two tenth-century Byzantine ivories depict the freezing trial of the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste with an unprecedented physical immediacy. If, in late antiquity, the convention was to depict martyrs in states of disassociation from suffering, these ivories capture their passion as an anguished, psychosomatic experience. This essay proffers new evidence to account for this shift. It demonstrates that the martyrs’ shivering posed a dual meaning previously unrecognized by medievalists, namely that the condition could be, in addition to a literal reaction to the cold, also an expression of spiritual dread and divine alienation. In the fourth century, Basil of Caesarea first gave therapeutic value to the Forty Martyrs’ voluntary shivering as a means of attaining psychosomatic purification (katharsis) before divine judgment. This essay traces the sacralization of this condition from the fourth to the tenth century. It follows its role in the patristic conversion of ancient medicine to its cultivation in the ritual life of medieval Constantinople. The ivories attest to how objects came to recreate states of co-suffering by establishing orientations of empathic engagement. These ivories occasion a new account of Middle Byzantine art and affect, specifically the cathartic mediation of fear.

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