This book examines ideas of spiritual nourishment as maintained chiefly by Patristic theologians –those who lived in Byzantium. It shows how a particular type of Byzantine frescoes and icons illustrated the views of Patristic thinkers on the connections between the heavenly and the earthly worlds. The author explores the occurrence, and geographical distribution, of this new type of iconography that manifested itself in representations concerned with the human body, and argues that these were a reaction to docetist ideas. The volume also investigates the diffusion of saints’ cults and demonstrates that this took place on a North-South axis as their veneration began in Byzantium and gradually reached the northern part of Europe, and eventually the entirety of Christendom.
Table of Content
Chapter 1. Introduction.- Chapter 2. The Connection Between Heavenly Nurture and Biological Sustenance in the Ancient World.- Chapter 3. Other Faith Encounters and Instances of Milk Nourishment.- Chapter 4. Anne’s Veneration as a Part of the Cult of the Saints .- Chapter 5. Patristic Texts about Saint Anne’s Role as an Intercessor with Regard to the Alleviation of People’s Barrenness and Healing in General.- Chapter 6. St. Anne as the Prototype of a Saint Connected with Healing and Nourishing in Various Literary Sources, Including the Apocrypha.- Chapter 7. Anna lactans/Galaktotrophousa Iconographic Motif Between the Twelfth and the Fourteenth Centuries.- Chapter 8. The Bogomils and Iconography.- Chapter 9. Conclusion.
About the author
Elena Ene D-Vasilescu is a Tutor and a Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, UK. Her teaching and research focus on Patristics and Byzantine Studies. She is the editor of
Devotion to St. Anne in Texts and Images (2018), and co-editor, with Mark Edwards, of
Visions of God and Ideas on Deification in Patristics Thought (2016). She has also published other books and many articles; among the most recent of her articles there are “Generation (γενεά) in Gregory Nazianzen’s poem
On the Son” (2017); “Early Christianity about the notion of time and the redemption of the world” (2017), and “Late Developments in Meta-Byzantine Icon-Painting” (2017).
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