05 — The Corpus

What Romanos actually wrote: the roughly sixty kontakia generally accepted as authentic out of the thousand once attributed to him, ranging across the feasts, the Old and New Testament narratives, the saints, and repentance — and the dramatic-dialogue technique, his most distinctive gift, that puts Mary, Peter, the Harlot, and Adam on his lips in their own voices.

This section moves from the legend and the single masterpiece to the body of work. It surveys the authentic corpus and the editorial labor that defined it (Maas and Trypanis dividing genuina from dubia), and then examines the dramatized monologues and dialogues that make the kontakia, in Krueger’s phrase, hover “between church and theatre.”

Files

File	Description
the-authentic-kontakia.md	The ~60 accepted authentic kontakia of the thousand attributed; the genuina/dubia division; the range of subjects
the-dramatic-dialogues.md	The dramatic-monologue technique — Mary at the Cross, Peter’s denial, the Harlot, Adam and Eve, the wise and foolish virgins

See Also

• Today the Virgin — the Mary–Magi dialogue as the model case
• Theology in Hymnody — the doctrine carried by the corpus
• Modern Scholarship — the editions that established the authentic corpus
• The Akathist Question — the most famous hymn disputed at the edge of the corpus