Modern Scholarship on St. Romanos

The modern recovery of St. Romanos the Melodist — from a half-remembered name attached to a chaotic manuscript tradition to one of the best-edited poets of Byzantium — is the work of the twentieth century: the critical edition of Paul Maas and C. A. Trypanis, the great French edition and monograph of José Grosdidier de Matons, the German edition of Johannes Koder, and a rich harvest of translation and interpretation in English. This chapter traces that arc and identifies the editions and studies on which any serious reading of Romanos now rests. The famous verdict that he is “the Pindar of rhythmic poetry” belongs to this recovery as much as to Romanos himself.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Byzantine hymnography)

From Neglect to Recovery

For most of the second Christian millennium Romanos was, in practical terms, lost. The kontakion as a living genre had been displaced in the liturgy by the kanon by roughly the ninth century (see the place in the rite), and Romanos’ long hymns survived only as the single surviving prooimion and first stanza printed in the service books, the bulk of each kontakion having dropped out of use (see the surviving fragments). The full texts slept in monastic manuscripts, above all in the great Patmos codex, and were not seriously studied until the modern period. The decisive nineteenth-century impulse came from the German Byzantinist Karl Krumbacher, who located and published kontakia from Patmos and other manuscripts and whose Geschichte der byzantinischen Litteratur (2nd ed., Munich, 1897) drew scholarly attention to Romanos as a poet of the first rank (J. Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos le Mélode et les origines de la poésie religieuse à Byzance, Paris, 1977, on the history of the scholarship). It was Krumbacher who supplied the assessment that has become the saint’s modern motto — that “in poetic talent, fire of inspiration, depth of feeling, and elevation of language” Romanos surpasses all the other melodes, and that posterity might one day acclaim him the greatest ecclesiastical poet of all ages. The epithet “the Pindar of rhythmic poetry,” comparing Romanos to the supreme lyric poet of classical Greece, belongs to this same current of admiration (Krumbacher, Geschichte, on Romanos; the epithet is widely quoted, e.g. Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Romanos the Melode”).

The Critical Edition: Maas and Trypanis

The first fully critical edition of the genuine corpus was the achievement of Paul Maas and C. A. Trypanis, Sancti Romani Melodi Cantica: Cantica Genuina (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), a volume of some xxxvi + 548 pages presenting the genuine kontakia with apparatus (P. Maas and C. A. Trypanis, Cantica Genuina, Oxford, 1963; reviewed in The Classical Review, 1963). This is the edition on which the modern study of Romanos’ Greek text rests, and it fixed the corpus of authentic hymns that scholarship now reckons with. Maas, one of the greatest textual critics and metricians of the century, had devoted decades to the metrics of Byzantine hymnody; the edition embodies that lifetime of work. The companion volume, Sancti Romani Melodi Cantica: Cantica Dubia (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1970), gathered the doubtful and probably inauthentic hymns transmitted under Romanos’ name; Maas died before it appeared, and it was carried to completion by Trypanis (P. Maas and C. A. Trypanis, Cantica Dubia, Berlin, 1970). Together the two volumes draw the essential line between the genuine and the spurious — a line that bears directly on the perennial question of how large Romanos’ output actually was [Disputed: the tradition speaks of around a thousand kontakia attributed to Romanos, e.g. the Synaxarion; the genuine corpus established by Maas–Trypanis is far smaller, on the order of fifty-nine hymns, with a further body of dubia (so Maas and Trypanis, Cantica Genuina and Cantica Dubia; cf. Grosdidier de Matons, Hymnes, who edits roughly the same authentic core)].

Grosdidier de Matons: The French Edition and the Monograph

If Maas and Trypanis gave the definitive critical text, the work that made Romanos readable and intelligible to the modern scholarly world was that of the French Byzantinist José Grosdidier de Matons. His edition Romanos le Mélode, Hymnes, with introduction, critical text, French translation, and notes, appeared in the Sources Chrétiennes series in five volumes over nearly two decades (Paris: Éditions du Cerf):

  • Tome I, Sources Chrétiennes 99 (1964)
  • Tome II, Sources Chrétiennes 110 (1965)
  • Tome III, Sources Chrétiennes 114 (1965)
  • Tome IV, Sources Chrétiennes 128 (1967)
  • Tome V, Sources Chrétiennes 283 (1981)

(J. Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos le Mélode, Hymnes, SC 99, 110, 114, 128, 283; Paris: Cerf, 1964–1981; preface to tome I by Paul Lemerle.) The facing French translation opened Romanos to a wide readership for the first time, and the introductions and notes remain indispensable. Crowning this labor was his magisterial monograph, Romanos le Mélode et les origines de la poésie religieuse à Byzance (Paris: Beauchesne, 1977), which set Romanos within the whole development of Byzantine religious poetry — its Syriac antecedents, its metrical principles, its liturgical setting — and which remains the single most important study of the poet (Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos le Mélode, Paris, 1977). For the French- and Greek-reading scholarly world, Romanos is in large measure Grosdidier de Matons’ Romanos, just as for the English-reading world he is, increasingly, the Romanos of his translators.

The German Edition: Johannes Koder

To the French and the older Oxford editions the Austrian Byzantinist Johannes Koder added a major modern German edition with translation, Romanos Melodos: Die Hymnen, published in two volumes in the Bibliothek der griechischen Literatur (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 2005–2006) (J. Koder, Romanos Melodos: Die Hymnen, 2 vols, Stuttgart, 2005–2006). Koder’s edition, with its extensive commentary, brought Romanos fully into German-language scholarship and reflects the renewed attention the poet has received in recent decades; Koder has also written widely on Romanos’ historical and liturgical context, including the poet’s engagement with the events and ideology of Justinian’s reign (see the world of Justinian).

The Music: Egon Wellesz

The recovery of Romanos as a poet was paralleled by the recovery of Byzantine chant as music, and here the foundational figure is Egon Wellesz, whose A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2nd rev. ed. 1961) established the modern study of the subject. Wellesz worked out the principles of Byzantine musical notation and the relation of melody to text in the kontakion and kanon, and his work frames any discussion of how Romanos’ hymns actually sounded (E. Wellesz, A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography, 2nd ed., Oxford, 1961; see metre, music, and performance). Because the original melodies of Romanos’ own century are not directly preserved in notation, much about the performance of the sixth-century kontakion remains a matter of careful reconstruction; Wellesz’s work, together with the metrical analysis of Maas, is the basis on which that reconstruction proceeds.

English Translation: Carpenter and Lash

The making of Romanos available in English is the work above all of two translators. Marjorie Carpenter produced the first complete English rendering of the corpus, Kontakia of Romanos, Byzantine Melodist, translated and annotated in two volumes (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1970 and 1973), based on the Maas–Trypanis text (M. Carpenter, Kontakia of Romanos, 2 vols, Columbia, MO, 1970/1973). Her annotated translation, comprehensive if sometimes free, gave English readers their first access to the whole of Romanos. The second great English translator was the Athonite-trained scholar-monk Archimandrite Ephrem Lash, whose selection On the Life of Christ: Kontakia (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, for the International Sacred Literature Trust, 1995) is the version most widely read today (Ephrem Lash, trans., On the Life of Christ: Kontakia, San Francisco, 1995, with a foreword by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I and an introductory essay by Andrew Louth). Lash combined deep liturgical knowledge with literary skill, and his renderings of the great festal kontakia — the Nativity, the Resurrection, the dialogues — convey both the meaning and something of the movement of Romanos’ verse (see “Today the Virgin” and the dramatic dialogues).

Interpretation: Krueger, Arentzen, and the New Wave

Recent decades have seen Romanos move from the editorial workshop to the center of interpretive scholarship on Byzantine religion. Derek Krueger has been the leading voice: his Writing and Holiness: The Practice of Authorship in the Early Christian East (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) treats Romanos’ self-presentation as author and sinner, and his Liturgical Subjects: Christian Ritual, Biblical Narrative, and the Formation of the Self in Byzantium (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) places the kontakia at the heart of an argument about how Byzantine worship formed the religious self — how the worshipper was scripted, through Romanos’ first-person refrains and dramatic voices, into the biblical story (D. Krueger, Writing and Holiness, 2004; Liturgical Subjects, 2014). Thomas Arentzen’s The Virgin in Song: Mary and the Poetry of Romanos the Melodist (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) is the major recent study of Romanos’ Mariology, reading his often startlingly vivid and even sensuous portrayals of the Theotokos (T. Arentzen, The Virgin in Song, 2017; see Christology and Mariology sung). Together these studies have made Romanos a central witness for the study of early Byzantine piety, no longer a curiosity of literary history but a primary source for how Christians in Justinian’s empire prayed, repented, and imagined the sacred.

The Shape of the Recovery

Taken together, this scholarship has accomplished for Romanos what an analogous body of work did for St. Ephrem the Syrian (see the modern scholarship on Ephrem): it has turned a half-legendary name into a clearly seen author. The critical text of Maas and Trypanis, the French edition and monograph of Grosdidier de Matons, the German edition of Koder, the musical framework of Wellesz, the English translations of Carpenter and Lash, and the interpretive studies of Krueger and Arentzen now constitute a mature field. Krumbacher’s hope — that the literary history of the future might acclaim Romanos the greatest ecclesiastical poet of all ages — has not been universally ratified, but the conditions for judging it have at last been supplied: the poet who was nearly lost is now among the best-edited and most discussed of Byzantine writers, and the “Pindar of rhythmic poetry” can be read whole.

See Also

References

  • Paul Maas and C. A. Trypanis, Sancti Romani Melodi Cantica: Cantica Genuina (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963).
  • Paul Maas and C. A. Trypanis, Sancti Romani Melodi Cantica: Cantica Dubia (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1970).
  • José Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos le Mélode, Hymnes, 5 vols, Sources Chrétiennes 99 (1964), 110 (1965), 114 (1965), 128 (1967), 283 (1981) (Paris: Éditions du Cerf).
  • José Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos le Mélode et les origines de la poésie religieuse à Byzance (Paris: Beauchesne, 1977).
  • Johannes Koder, Romanos Melodos: Die Hymnen, 2 vols (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 2005–2006).
  • Egon Wellesz, A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography, 2nd rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961).
  • Marjorie Carpenter, trans., Kontakia of Romanos, Byzantine Melodist, 2 vols (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1970 and 1973).
  • Archimandrite Ephrem Lash, trans., On the Life of Christ: Kontakia (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995).
  • Derek Krueger, Writing and Holiness: The Practice of Authorship in the Early Christian East (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
  • Derek Krueger, Liturgical Subjects: Christian Ritual, Biblical Narrative, and the Formation of the Self in Byzantium (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014).
  • Thomas Arentzen, The Virgin in Song: Mary and the Poetry of Romanos the Melodist (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).
  • Karl Krumbacher, Geschichte der byzantinischen Litteratur, 2nd ed. (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1897).