Audience and Action in Byzantine Ceremonies

On May 12, Boethius Fellow Dr. Erik Ellis presided over the panel “Audience and Action in Byzantine Ceremonies” at the International Medieval Congress at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. The panel was sponsored by the Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture. Over two sessions, the panel brought together an international group of academics, including Dr. Elisa Emaldi, curator at the Museo Nazionale di Ravenna, home of the famous Justiniac basilicas and their polychrome mosaics.  The interdisciplinary group brought insights from archaeology, art history, literary studies, theology, and political theory to bear on Byzantine civic and religious ceremonies. In addition to the analysis of texts, art objects, and buildings, participants sought to recreate and appreciate the mental, spiritual, and affective states of participants in these ceremonies. Over the next year, the panelists plan to rework the papers into an edited volume.

Keynotes of the panel across its two sessions were synthesis and context. Scholarship on Byzantine ceremonies has tended over the last century to employ hermeneutic frames that reduce art, architecture, music, and ritual to political instruments. While not denying the undoubted political function of public ritual, panelists also worked to understand how participants in these ceremonies understood and experienced them as bringing together representatives of social and political factions in a common purpose that reconciled the civic and religious, the historical and eschatological, and the earthly and heavenly. Dr. Ellis hopes that the panel and the eventual publication of the edited volume will contribute to the contemporary recovery of classical culture in one its most beautiful Christian expressions.