The International Greek New Testament Project (IGNTP), Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing
Thesis Title: Aspects of St Anna's cult in Byzantium
About
This study is the first undertaking in Byzantine scholarship to focus on St Anna, the mother of the Virgin Mary, and its contribution lies in the fact that it enriches our knowledge of otherwise unknown aspects of the Byzantine culture. The title ‘Aspects of St Anna’s cult in Byzantium’ successfully introduces the multiplicity of the material selected to substantiate this endeavour. I looked at topography, texts, relics and visual evidence to reconstruct aspects of St Anna’s veneration in Byzantium from the sixth until the fifteenth century. The sixth century – and Justinian’s I reign in particular – has been selected as starting point because it is when the first church of St Anna was dedicated in Constantinople.
More analytically, the first topic discussed is sixth-century Constantinopolitan topography. Although the topography of the Byzantine capital is a well-studied topic in Byzantine studies, the proximity of St Anna’s churches both to water and to churches dedicated to Mary has not been brought forth by any Byzantine scholar. Using topographical evidence from Jerusalem and Constantinople, I demonstrate not only the influence of the topography of the Holy City on the Byzantine capital in the sixth century and explain the reasons behind this proximity but also the ideological associations that Justinian I gave to this topographical model. Namely, emperors’ active role in the creation of new topographical patterns has not been examined by scholars, but, as I show, Justinian’s profound interest in creating sacred spaces is a fact, and derives from his inclination towards healing saints and his interest in Mary. Thus a new idea is introduced to the studies of Constantinopolitan topography, that of the association of imperial patronage to healing, creation of sacred space and St Anna.
Moreover, this work revolves around literary works, starting from the Protevangelion of James, the only account of the life of Mary’s parents. I explore the genealogy of Mary, the various traditions behind the life of Anna and Joachim (Anna’s husband), the attitude of early writers toward the Protevangelion of James, which will be compared to the way Byzantine preachers use the Protevangelion and Mary’s early life in particular. The study of St Anna’s cult in Byzantium introduces new perceptions about the way the Byzantines made use of their tradition and the process from disregard to acknowledgment of the Protevangelion witnesses this development. Early Christian writers and Church Fathers did not give credit to this second-century apocryphal text. But from the eighth century onwards preachers started using the story of Anna and Joachim in their homilies on Mary’s early life, which ultimately changed not only the perception of each congregation towards Mary’s parents but also of the whole Byzantine culture. I clearly demonstrate that the lever that agitated this crucial development is the theological implications created by the outbreak of Iconoclasm, when the dogma of the Incarnation of Christ necessitated the promotion of Christ’s physical forbearers. As a result, the Protevangelion reached a certain point when despite its apocryphal (non-canonical) nature, it was considered even ‘part of the Holy Scripture’, as preachers themselves admit. Additionally, although Marian homilies has recently been brought to the surface by M. B. Cunningham, there has not been any study on the way Mary’s parents are presented in these homilies. This is achieved here and covers all the time span of their appearance in homilies, namely from the eighth and until the fifteenth century, making this proposed work a major bibliographical contribution to Marian studies.
In order to introduce the social aspects of St Anna’s veneration in Byzantium, I once more pore over texts but different in nature from the ones mentioned above. Using hagiography and histories I explore the ideologies attributed to women named Anna the most common of which was Iconophilia (= support of the veneration of icons). St Anna was barren according to the Protevangelion but managed to conceive the Virgin through praying.The perpetuation of this information in relation to the popularity of the Protevangelion resulted in Anna’s establishment as a protector of childbirth. This tendency is reflected in the life of saints whose mothers are named Anna and in tenth-century patronage stories of Byzantine empresses, who appear to construct a monument dedicated to the saint after conceiving or giving birth. Apart from the relation between male patronage and St Anna, female patronage as well has itself not been studied in connection to childbearing and St Anna. Additionally, this category of text shows that from the eight century and by the end of the tenth, St Anna was established as a protector of childbirth and the study of women named Anna in hagiography and histories bring to the surface another connection, that of the name Anna and demonstration of Orthodoxy. The connection of St Anna with demonstration of Orthodoxy is nowhere found in Byzantine studies and it is another contribution to Byzantine studies.
Using textual evidence from the eighth century onwards, I have pieced together the traditions around the relics of St Anna in Byzantium, which has not been attempted in Byzantine scholarship. I show that despite the fact that the information provided in these textual sources is often very perplexing, a number of locations can be safeguarded as places where the relics of the saint actually appeared. The complicated nature of this endeavour is likewise reflected in the number of martyrs named Anna, who were worshipped in the Byzantine capital as tenth-century liturgical texts show. The examination of St Anna’s relics in combination with Byzantine homilies shows that the eighth century is the starting point for the spread of St Anna’s veneration in Byzantium. The stories of the first appearance of Anna’s relics are placed in the eighth century (mentioned by tenth-century sources), when the first homilies on Mary’s early life started to be written. However, St Anna’s veneration was not established earlier that the ninth century as the evidence from church-calendars shows, which are also examined here for the first time in relation to Mary’s parents.
Finally, the last section of the proposed work is dedicated to pictorial evidence. The material used encompasses works of Byzantine art from a significant number of areas of Byzantine authority either political or artistic. After an extensive presentation of the iconography of Mary’s parents in both monumental art and minor arts, I provide a complete overview of the depictions of Mary’s parents, since I combine both published and unpublished material to present the first complete iconographical corpus of St Anna’s in Byzantium. Since the scenes of Mary’s early life (where Mary’s parents have unavoidably been included), has been studied in detail by Lafontaine-Dosogne, in this work I present the first corpus of iconic depictions of the saint (and her husband’s) and thus this work together with that of Lafontaine-Dosogne are the only and most complete iconographical contributions of St Anna in Byzantium.
This work demonstrates that although St Anna is a completely underexposed figure in Byzantine studies, the examination of the formation, establishment, and promotion of her veneration offers a fresh insight to the way saints were manipulated in Byzantium. It also demonstrates the extremely valuable information one can get hold of by studying the role of saint in Byzantium. Due to the variety of topic it discusses, it will interest academics from a variety of fields, some of them have already been mentioned but I should also add literature and art historians, students of social, liturgical and theological studies, of early Christian and Byzantine topography, of homiletics, relics, and of early Christian texts.
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