Romanos and the Kontakion
The golden age of the kontakion in the person of its supreme master, St. Romanos the Melodist, and the greatest of all canons, the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete. This section treats the works — the kontakia and the Great Canon — deferring the poets’ biographies to their own collections.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Byzantine hymnography)
Overview
This section is about two towering hymnographic achievements and the men who made them, treated through the works rather than the lives. The first file follows St. Romanos the Melodist and the kontakion he brought to perfection in sixth-century Constantinople — the sung verse-sermon, its form and its theology, its authentic corpus and its later eclipse. The second file treats St. Andrew of Crete’s Great Canon, the longest and most penitential of all canons, as a text: its structure, its method of self-address, and its tour through the whole of Scripture. In both cases the biographies — Romanos’s life from Emesa to Constantinople, Andrew’s from Damascus to Crete — are left to the dedicated collections (St. Romanos the Melodist, St. Andrew of Crete), and the focus here is on the hymns themselves and their place in the story of Orthodox hymnography.
Files
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| the-kontakion-and-romanos.md | St. Romanos the Melodist and the golden age of the kontakion: the form, the corpus, the theology sung, and the eclipse of the genre |
| andrew-of-crete-and-the-great-canon.md | The Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete as a work: its length, its self-address, its sweep from Adam to the Gospel, and its Lenten place |
See Also
- The Akathist Hymn — the great kontakion that outlived the genre
- The Damascene and the Canon — the canon at its height in the next generation
- St. Romanos the Melodist and St. Andrew of Crete — the poets’ lives