Performing the Gospels in Byzantium: Sight, Sound, and Space in the Divine Liturgy

Tracing the Gospel text from script to illustration to recitation, this study looks at how illuminated manuscripts operated within ritual and architecture. Focusing on a group of richly illuminated lectionaries from the late eleventh century, the book articulates how the process of textual recitation produced marginalia and miniatures that reflected and subverted the manner in which the Gospel was read and simultaneously imagined by readers and listeners alike. This unique approach to manuscript illumination points to images that slowly unfolded in the mind of its listeners as they imagined the text being recited, as meaning carefully changed and built as the text proceeded. By examining this process within specific acoustic architectural spaces and the sonic conditions of medieval chant, the volume brings together the concerns of sound studies, liturgical studies, and art history to demonstrate how images, texts, and recitations played with the environment of the Middle Byzantine church.

About the Author

Roland Betancourt is Professor of Art History at the University of California, Irvine, where he has been awarded the distinction of Chancellor's Fellow from 2019-2022. Previously, he was the Elizabeth and J. Richardson Dilworth Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His published books include Sight, Touch, and Imagination in Byzantium (Cambridge, 2018) and Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages (2020). His ongoing work focuses on Byzantine temporality and simulacral spaces, past and present.