The Sources
The collection’s source-critical flagship. The neomartyrs reach us primarily through a devotional literature compiled to strengthen a persecuted Church, and this section examines it as source. The first file treats the Neon Martyrologion of St. Nikodemos the Hagiorite (1799) and its predecessors — the collections of John Karyophylles and of Kaisarios Dapontes — as a body of texts with a history; the second treats the genre’s conventions and asks what can be known independent of the hagiography, including from the Ottoman court records where they have been studied.
Tradition: Greek / Balkan Orthodox (Pan-Orthodox in scope)
Overview
Everything in this collection depends on the reliability and the character of the sources, and so, following the repository’s practice of making a source-critical statement the hinge of any collection built on hagiography (the model is St. Xenia of Petersburg’s methodology file), this section is placed early and treated with care.
The first file, The Neon Martyrologion, treats the great collection itself: St. Nikodemos the Hagiorite and St. Makarios of Corinth’s New Martyrology (Venice, 1799), its purpose as resistance literature, its programmatic preface, and the earlier collections it drew upon — the Ephemerides of John Karyophylles, Grand Logothete of the Patriarchate, and the neomartyrological collection of the monk Kaisarios Dapontes, itself drawing on the work of Ionas Kausokalyvites. The biography of St. Nikodemos is deferred to his own collection; here the book is the subject.
The second file, The Genre and What Survives, treats the acta as a genre with conventions — the recurring structure of temptation, confession, torment, and death — and asks the hard source-critical question: what can be established about the neomartyrs independent of the hagiography? It draws on the Ottomanist scholarship (Krstić, Vaporis) and on the study of the Ottoman court registers (sicils) where they bear on the martyrdoms.
Contents
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| the-neon-martyrologion.md | The Neon Martyrologion (1799); Nikodemos and Makarios; the preface and its theology; the predecessor collections of Karyophylles and Dapontes |
| the-genre-and-what-survives.md | The acta as genre; the conventions of the passion-narrative; what survives independent of hagiography; the Ottoman court records; confessionalization |
See Also
- Who the Neomartyrs Are — the category these sources transmit
- The Martyrs of the Cities — the individual lives drawn from these sources
- St. Nikodemos the Hagiorite — the compiler, whose biography is deferred there
- St. Xenia of Petersburg: Methodology — the repository’s model source-critical flagship
References
- Nikodemos the Hagiorite, St., and St. Makarios of Corinth, comps. Neon Martyrologion. 1st ed. Venice, 1799.
- Krstić, Tijana. Contested Conversions to Islam. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011.
- Vaporis, Nomikos Michael. Witnesses for Christ. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000.