Poems, Canons, and the Scriptorium

The Studite contribution to the Church’s verse and book-culture: the iambic Epigrams (ed. Speck) — the most securely attributed of Theodore’s poetry; the Studite share in the Lenten Triodion, including Theodore’s second Lenten weekday canon and his brother Joseph’s first, set within the scholarly caution that much Triodion hymnography is the work of the Studite school rather than of Theodore’s own hand; and the renowned Studite scriptorium — its penances for negligent scribes, its book-production, and its place in the history of the Greek minuscule hand.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Byzantine)

The Iambic Epigrams

The most securely attributed of Theodore’s verse is his collection of iambic Epigrams — short poems in the classical iambic trimeter, edited critically by Paul Speck, Theodoros Studites: Jamben auf verschiedene Gegenstände (Supplementa Byzantina 1, Berlin: De Gruyter, 1968). These include poems on the duties of the monastery’s officers (a verse counterpart to the institutional ordering of the reformed house), “picture-poems,” and the iconophile verses Theodore composed for the Chalke Gate of the imperial palace, to replace the iconoclast inscription there (Speck, Jamben, 1968; Cholij, Theodore the Stoudite, 2002, pp. 24, 130–135). The Epigrams matter twice over: as a window onto the reformed monastery (the poems on the offices), and as evidence of Theodore’s place in the Byzantine revival of classical iambic verse — for unlike his contested hymnography, the iambic corpus has a firm critical edition and a secure attribution, and it shows the classically educated schoolman behind the abbot (see The Formation of a Reformer).

The Studite house made a large and lasting contribution to the Lenten Triodion, the service book of the Great Fast — but the precise extent of Theodore’s personal authorship is one of the places where popular tradition outruns the evidence, and the careful course is to state both what is secure and what is not.

What is secure, on the authority of the standard English Triodion (introduced by Bishop Kallistos Ware), is this: the ninth-century Studite monks gave the Lenten Triodion its present structure and composed much of its content, so that the book is substantially the product of Studite editorial and compositional work; and within that work, “St. Theodore composed the second canon for weekdays in Lent, and his brother Joseph the first” — the distinctive three-ode canons (triodia) that give the book its very name (Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos Ware, The Lenten Triodion, Faber, 1978, Introduction). The canon for the Sunday of the Last Judgment (Meatfare) is likewise carried in the Triodion under Theodore’s name (Ware, 1978). [Corrected: Theodore’s brother is Joseph, Archbishop of Thessalonica (the Confessor), not to be confused with the later Joseph the Hymnographer; popular sources frequently conflate the two and so misattribute hymns.]

What is not secure is the much larger penumbra of hymns and canons that circulate under Theodore’s name. [Disputed: the broad attribution of Triodion hymnography to Theodore personally is contested. Bishop Kallistos’s careful formulation credits the Studite school of the ninth century with the book’s structure and much of its content, naming Theodore securely only for the second Lenten weekday canon (and his brother Joseph for the first); other ninth-century and later hands (Theophanes Graptos, Joseph the Hymnographer, Leo VI, Kassia, and contributors down to the fourteenth–fifteenth centuries) supplied much of the rest, and the book kept growing for some six centuries (Ware, 1978). Reviewing the scholarship, Peter Galadza notes that “the jury is still out as to certifiable attribution” of much of the verse ascribed to Theodore — including even the anabathmoi of the Octoechos sometimes credited to him.] The honest statement is therefore corporate: the Studite house, Theodore at its head, shaped the Triodion and wrote much of it; Theodore’s own securely-identified pieces are fewer than the tradition popularly assigns him.

The Studite Scriptorium

Under Theodore the Stoudios became a major center of book production, with a celebrated scriptorium and library — a natural extension of the reform’s insistence that every monk labor (see Abbot of Stoudios). The seriousness with which Theodore regarded the work is visible in his penitential canons (Epitimia), which include dedicated sections “Concerning the Scribe” and “Concerning the Librarian,” prescribing graded penances — genuflexions and prostrations — for negligence: for a careless or hasty hand, for failing to follow the exemplar, for damaging or mis-shelving the books (Featherstone & Holland, “A Note on Penances Prescribed for Negligent Scribes and Librarians in the Monastery of Studios,” Scriptorium 36.2, 1982, pp. 258–260). The copying of books was, for Theodore, an ascetic discipline like any other, and error in it a fault to be repented.

The Minuscule Book Hand

The Stoudios is traditionally credited with a decisive role in the development of the Greek minuscule book hand — the small, connected, economical script that replaced the older majuscule (uncial) and made possible the great medieval recopying of Greek literature in compact, affordable books (Cholij, pp. 130–135; Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Minuscule”). [Disputed: the claim that minuscule was invented at the Stoudios is traditional but overstated; the modern paleographical view is that minuscule evolved from earlier documentary and cursive scripts and that the Stoudios refined and standardized an already-emerging book hand rather than originating it (so e.g. C. R. Bates, “Stoudios: The Convergence of History, Paleography, and Textual Criticism on the Greek Minuscule Hand,” Diogenes 11, 2021).] The earliest surviving dated Greek minuscule manuscript, the Uspenski Gospels (Gregory-Aland 461, dated 835, now in St. Petersburg), is by tradition the work of a Studite monk named Nicholas — though the Studite attribution rests on identifying the scribe and is “probable” rather than colophon-proven.

A frequent confusion deserves correction. The richly illustrated Theodore Psalter (British Library, Add MS 19352), made at the Stoudios in 1066, is not named for St. Theodore the Studite (d. 826) but for the scribe Theodore, a protopresbyter of the Stoudios from Caesarea who copied it and is named in its colophon; the abbot and patron was a certain Michael (Barber, Theodore Psalter commentary; British Library catalogue, Add MS 19352). [Disputed: the Theodore Psalter is sometimes wrongly associated with St. Theodore the Studite himself; it honors the eleventh-century scribe Theodore of Caesarea, with Michael as abbot/patron.] The Psalter is nonetheless a monument of the Studite scribal tradition Theodore founded — testimony, two and a half centuries on, to the book-culture his reform planted at the Stoudios.

The Epigrams and the Byzantine Iambic Revival

The iambic Epigrams repay a closer look, for they are at once the most securely Theodoran of his verse and the clearest evidence of his place in the literary culture of his age. Paul Speck’s critical edition gathers the corpus and sorts it by subject (Speck, Jamben auf verschiedene Gegenstände, 1968), and the subjects themselves form a portrait of the reformed house seen from the inside. A substantial group of the Epigrams is addressed to the officers and the offices of the monastery — verses for the cellarer, the cook, the gardener, the calligrapher, the infirmarian, and the rest — short poems that hang, as it were, over each station of the common life, naming its dignity and its temptation in a few trimeters. These are the verse counterpart to the institutional ordering of the Hypotyposis: where the rule assigns the office, the epigram sanctifies it, and the two together show how thoroughly Theodore meant the whole of the monastery’s labor to be drawn up into the spiritual life (Speck, 1968; Cholij, Theodore the Stoudite, 2002, pp. 24, 130–135; see Abbot of Stoudios). Other epigrams are dedicatory or commemorative, attached to objects, persons, and places, in the long Greek tradition of the inscribed verse.

The most charged of the Epigrams are the iconophile verses Theodore composed for the Chalke Gate of the imperial palace, the great bronze-roofed entrance whose Christ-image had been the first casualty of the first iconoclasm and remained the symbolic battleground of the icon question; Theodore’s verses were meant to vindicate the restored image against the iconoclast inscription that had stood there (Speck, 1968; Cholij, pp. 24, 130–135). In the Epigrams, then, the poet and the confessor are the same man: the classical form carries the iconodule confession. And the form is itself significant. Theodore wrote in the strict classical iambic trimeter at a time when Byzantine poetry was moving from the quantitative meters of antiquity toward verse governed by stress and syllable-count; his competent handling of the old meter marks him as one of the figures of the early-ninth-century revival of learned iambic verse, the literary side of the same renaissance that produced the minuscule book hand and the recopying of the classics (Speck, 1968; Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Theodore of Stoudios”). It is worth stressing the contrast with his hymnography: the iambic corpus has a firm critical edition and a secure attribution, whereas the bulk of the Triodion verse ascribed to Theodore is [Disputed] (Ware, The Lenten Triodion, 1978). The Epigrams are thus the safest ground on which to meet Theodore the poet, and on that ground he appears as a classically educated schoolman who turned his learning to the service of the reform and the icons (see The Formation of a Reformer).

The Scriptorium in Byzantine Book History

The Studite scriptorium deserves to be set in the larger history of the Byzantine book, for its importance is not merely local. The late eighth and ninth centuries saw the transliteration of Greek literature from the old majuscule (uncial) hand into the new minuscule — the systematic recopying, into compact and economical books, of the texts that had survived the “dark age” of Byzantine letters; this transliteration is the bottleneck through which most ancient Greek literature reached the modern world, and the script that made it possible is the minuscule whose refinement is associated with the Stoudios (Cholij, pp. 130–135; Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.vv. “Minuscule,” “Transliteration”; Bates, “Stoudios,” Diogenes 11, 2021). Theodore’s house, with its disciplined community, its insistence that every monk labor, and its penitential canons governing the scribe and the librarian (Featherstone & Holland, Scriptorium 36.2, 1982, pp. 258–260), was institutionally suited to exactly this work, and the tradition that places the Stoudios near the center of the minuscule’s standardization rests on that fitness as much as on any single surviving book.

The surviving books, however, anchor the tradition and also discipline it. The earliest dated witness, the Uspenski (Uspensky) Gospels — Gregory-Aland 461, written in 835 and now in the National Library of Russia at St. Petersburg — is the oldest precisely dated Greek minuscule manuscript known, and by a long-standing tradition it is the work of a Studite monk named Nicholas; the attribution is reasoned from the identification of the scribe and the milieu, and is best stated as probable rather than colophon-proven (Cholij, pp. 130–135; Bates, 2021; Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Uspenskij Gospels”). Around this earliest dated book the broader Studite claim must be calibrated: the modern paleographical consensus is that minuscule evolved from earlier documentary and cursive hands and that the Stoudios refined and standardized an already-emerging book hand rather than inventing the script outright, so the older, grander claim that minuscule was “invented at the Stoudios” is to be retired in favor of this more exact account (Bates, “Stoudios,” Diogenes 11, 2021). The case is a useful instance of the general rule of this work: the genuine Studite achievement — disciplined, large-scale, high-quality book production at a pivotal moment for the transmission of Greek letters — is impressive enough that it need not be inflated into a myth of sole invention. The later Theodore Psalter of 1066 (British Library, Add MS 19352), named for its eleventh-century scribe Theodore of Caesarea and not for St. Theodore the Studite, stands at the far end of this same scribal tradition: two and a half centuries on, the Stoudios was still producing books of the first rank, the long fruit of the discipline Theodore’s reform had planted (see The Catecheses for the prose written and copied in the same house).

References

Speck, Paul, ed. Theodoros Studites: Jamben auf verschiedene Gegenstände. Supplementa Byzantina 1. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1968. (The critical edition of the iambic Epigrams.)
Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos Ware, trans. The Lenten Triodion. London: Faber and Faber, 1978. (Introduction: the Studite contribution to the Triodion; Theodore’s second Lenten weekday canon, Joseph’s first.)
Featherstone, J. M., and Meridel Holland. “A Note on Penances Prescribed for Negligent Scribes and Librarians in the Monastery of Studios.” Scriptorium 36.2 (1982): 258–260. (The penitential canons on the scribe and librarian.)
Bates, Clark R. “Stoudios: The Convergence of History, Paleography, and Textual Criticism on the Greek Minuscule Hand.” Diogenes 11 (2021). (The qualified view of the Stoudios and the minuscule.)
Cholij, Roman. Theodore the Stoudite: The Ordering of Holiness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
British Library, Add MS 19352 (the Theodore Psalter, 1066); Charles Barber, ed., commentary to the facsimile. (On the naming of the Psalter for the scribe Theodore of Caesarea.)
The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. Alexander Kazhdan et al. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. (s.vv. “Minuscule,” “Triodion,” “Theodore of Stoudios,” “Transliteration,” “Uspenskij Gospels,” “Chalke.”)