Abstract

Third Annual Public Lecture in Medieval and Early Modern Slavonic Studies Lecture in collaboration with the Byzantine Worlds Seminar

Sponsored: CRASSH and Cambridge Ukrainian Studies

Robert Romanchuk is a philologist. He has published the monograph Byzantine Hermeneutics and Pedagogy in the Russian North: Monks and Masters at the Kirillo-Belozerskii Monastery, 1397–1501 (U. Toronto Press, 2007) and a number of book chapters and journal publications, most recently chapters on the literature of Mount Athos for David Wallace’s Europe: A Literary History, 1348–1418 (Oxford UP, 2016) and on “lettered education” in Kyivan Rus for the English translation of Mykhailo Hrushevsky’s History of Ukraine-Rus’, vol. 3 (ed. Frank Sysyn: CIUS , 2016). He is preparing a critical edition of the Byzantine romantic epic Digenis Akritis in its Old Slavonic translation, The Deeds of the Brave Men of Old. He also works in psychoanalysis and literature.

Brad Hostetler is an art historian whose research focuses on relics and reliquaries, text and image relationships, and patronage practices in the Byzantine Empire. He has held fellowships at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His current book project examines the design and use of reliquaries in Byzantium after Iconoclasm and before the Fourth Crusade. He looks at the ways in which these objects mediated the viewer’s access to, and veneration of, sacred matter in personal devotion and public ceremonial.