Kassia and the Women Hymnographers

The one woman whose hymns entered the received service books of the Byzantine Church under her own name — Kassia the Hymnographer, author of the Hymn of Kassiani sung on Great and Holy Wednesday — and the wider, thinner record of women in Byzantine hymnography. There is no separate Kassia collection in this repository; she is covered fully here.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Byzantine hymnography)

Overview

Byzantine hymnography is overwhelmingly the work of men — monks and bishops of the great monastic centres — but not entirely. Kassia the Hymnographer, a ninth-century Constantinopolitan abbess, is the great exception: a woman whose hymns were received into the liturgical books under her own name and are still sung, above all the Hymn of Kassiani on Great and Holy Wednesday. The first file of this section treats Kassia fully — her life and monastery, her authenticated corpus and the problems of attribution, the Hymn of Kassiani, and the famous bride-show story, which is flagged as later chronicle tradition of contested historicity per the repository’s attestation rule. The second file sets Kassia within the wider, much thinner record of women in Byzantine hymnography — what can and cannot be said about other women poets, and why the record is so sparse.

Files

File Description
kassia-the-hymnographer.md Kassia’s life and monastery; her authenticated corpus and the attribution problem; the Hymn of Kassiani; the bride-show as later chronicle tradition
women-in-byzantine-hymnography.md The wider record of women in Byzantine hymnody; Kassia’s singularity; the reasons the record is so thin

See Also