Please join us for our second presentation of the autumn quarter with Global Approaches to Sacred Space with Thomas Arentzen who will present "A Venture into Dark Mariology."
Abstract: The Akathistos is a mysterious piece of poetry and probably the most important Marian song of the Byzantine realm. Apart from the fact that nobody knows who wrote it and when, it has a peculiar constitution: As opposed to much kontakion hymnography, it lacks a narrative development; instead it depends on flourishing imagery which slings itself out in intertwining scrolls. Thus it appears as a spatially oriented composition. At the same time, the Akathistos – despite later iconographic domestication of its otherwise wild and sprawling metaphorical growth – confronts us with perplexing images and unimaginable spaces.
Having discussed such tensions, I will venture into what I call the “dark mariology” of the hymn and explore how the salutations’ obscure imagery associates the Theotokos with landscapes and fields – where the Logos incarnates into more-than-human flesh – and downplays her human forms in ways that yield an earthier and more dispersed Marian imagination.
Thomas Arentzen is Researcher in Greek at Uppsala University and Reader in Church History from Lund University. He is also Senior Lecturer in Eastern Christian Studies at Sankt Ignatios College (Stockholm School of Theology).
Arentzen specializes in early Christian poetry, devotional literature, sexuality, and ecology. Currently, he conducts the research project Beyond the Garden: An Ecocritical Approach to Early Byzantine Christianity (funded by the Swedish Research Council), which focuses on trees in late ancient and Byzantine sources. He holds a doctorate in Church History from Lund University. While he worked as postdoc in Oslo, he spent half a year as visiting scholar at Brown University. During 2018–19, he was Fellow in Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks (Washington DC).
Arentzen has written The Virgin in Song: Mary and the Poetry of Romanos the Melodist (Divinations series, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), and he has edited and translated Greek hymns in the forthcoming volume Romanos the Melodist: Songs about Women (Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 83, Harvard University Press, 2024). With Virginia Burrus and Glenn Peers, Arentzen has co-authored the monograph Byzantine Tree Life: Christianity and the Arboreal Imagination (New Approaches to Byzantine History and Culture, Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). He has also edited several volumes, including Orthodox Tradition and Human Sexuality (Orthodox Christianity and Contemporary Thought, Fordham University Press, 2022) with Ashley Purpura and Aristotle Papanikolaou.
For further information, visit our website: https://globalsacredspace.su.domains/
Global Approaches to Sacred Space is generously funded as part of the SGS Global Research Workshop series with further support from The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies, the Department of Religious Studies, the Department of History, the Department of Classics, the Department of Art and Art History, the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, The Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, and the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis. Co-organized by Bissera V. Pentcheva, Maria Shevelkina, Emilia Cottignoli, & Maria Terss.