Abstract

The workshop will explore the Old Slavonic version of the 12th-c. Byzantine “romantic epic” Digenis Akritis — a text of considerable importance to Byzantine, Slavonic, and oral-traditional studies. The Slavonic Digenis, produced in 13th-c. Ukrainian Galicia or 14th-c. Macedonia, represents the work’s only consistently epic extension and the earliest uncontested witness of Slavonic epic composition. A distant cousin of the long-winded Grottaferrata version, it expands on the material of their concise Greek common ancestor by means of oral-traditional formulas and themes found in near-contemporary and later Greek and Slavonic folksong. It presents the editor of a critical text with a number of sui generis problems.

Robert Romanchuk (PhD Slavic, UCLA 1999 ) is Pribic Family Associate Professor of Slavic and Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at Florida State University and a 2018–19 HURI /Ukrainian Studies Fund Research Fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. His fields are philology and psychoanalysis. In the first field 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.

The workshop, a collaborative undertaking of Cambridge Ukrainian Studies and Byzantine Worlds Seminar, will be led in English and all interested postgraduate students and scholars of medieval history and culture are welcome to attend. The event is free but online registration is required. Register at www.CambridgeUkrainianStudies.org by 22 October, 2018. Upon registration you will be sent pdfs of recommended readings.

Participants may apply for reimbursement of costs for domestic economy train/coach travel to and from Cambridge. To apply for reimbursement, please send a brief CV and two to five-sentence statement of interest to Olga Płócienniczak, Senior Secretary, Slavonic Studies, Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages, at slavonic@mml.cam.ac.uk by 22 October, 2018. Please retain all your travel receipts.

Coffee, lunch and refreshments will be served during the workshop.

• 11.00 – 11.30 Participants arrive; refreshments served
• 11.30 – 12.30 Seminar Discussion
• 12.30 – 13.00 Lunch
• 13.00 – 14.00 Seminar Discussion
• 14.00 – 14.30 Conclusions
• 14.30 – 15.00 Refreshments served

Queries: Rosie Finlinson, rf303@cam.ac.uk; Dr Olenka Pevny, ozp20@cam.ac.uk