Forthcoming Publication by Faculty Member

Dr Andrew Mellas, Senior Lecturer in Church History and Liturgical Studies, has a new publication due for release soon titled Liturgy and the Emotions in Byzantium: Compunction and Hymnody (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

A 20% discount is available on this title until 30 June 2020 via Cambridge University Press. Simply enter the code MELLAS20 at the checkout.

This book explores the liturgical experience of emotions in Byzantium through the hymns of Romanos the Melodist, Andrew of Crete and Kassia. It reimagines the performance of their hymns during Great Lent and Holy Week in Constantinople. In doing so, it understands compunction as a liturgical emotion, intertwined with paradisal nostalgia, a desire for repentance and a wellspring of tears. For the faithful, liturgical emotions were embodied experiences that were enacted through sacred song and mystagogy. The three hymnographers chosen for this study span a period of nearly four centuries and had an important connection to Constantinople, which forms the topographical and liturgical nexus of the study. Their work also covers three distinct genres of hymnography: kontakion, kanon and sticheron idiomelon. Through these lenses of period, place and genre this study examines the affective performativity hymns and the Byzantine experience of compunction.

Andrew Mellas has also recently published Hymns of Repentance by Saint Romanos the Melodist (SVS Press, 2020), and is the co-editor (with Sarah Gador-Whyte) of Hymns, Homilies, and Hermeneutics in Byzantium (Brill, forthcoming).