Performing the Gospels in Byzantium
Sight, Sound, and Space in the Divine Liturgy
- Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture Publication Grant
How the Gospel book was seen, heard, and handled in the Byzantine liturgy. The book follows the Gospel text from script to illustration to recitation, reading the marginalia and miniatures of eleventh-century lectionaries as responses to how the text was read aloud and imagined by listeners, inside the acoustic spaces of the Middle Byzantine church.
From the publisher
Tracing the Gospel text from script to illustration to recitation, this study looks at how illuminated manuscripts operated within ritual and architecture. Focusing on a group of richly illuminated lectionaries from the late eleventh century, the book articulates how the process of textual recitation produced marginalia and miniatures that reflected and subverted the manner in which the Gospel was read and simultaneously imagined by readers and listeners alike. This unique approach to manuscript illumination points to images that slowly unfolded in the mind of its listeners as they imagined the text being recited, as meaning carefully changed and built as the text proceeded. By examining this process within specific acoustic architectural spaces and the sonic conditions of medieval chant, the volume brings together the concerns of sound studies, liturgical studies, and art history to demonstrate how images, texts, and recitations played with the environment of the Middle Byzantine church.
Description courtesy of Cambridge University Press.
Praise
Betancourt is a brilliant art historian, well versed in theoretical models and with an uncanny ability to make compelling connections among images, texts, and rituals.
Vasileios Marinis, The Medieval ReviewIt remains to stress the book’s positive contributions to scholarship.... Copiously annotated with bibliographic references, the latter clearly results from extensive research.
Georgi Parpulov, The Byzantine ReviewRoland Betancourt... has produced yet another excellent book, one that reaffirms the value of Byzantine liturgy in Byzantine Studies and demonstrates the value of building bridges among disciplines.... Note should be made of the lavish illustrations of the highest quality, which make this book not only a treat for the mind but also a feast for the eyes.
Stefanos Alexopoulos, Church HistoryBetancourt’s Performing the Gospels in Byzantium captivatingly explores the visual, sonic, expressive, liturgical and even architectural contexts of a group of highly illuminated Middle Byzantine lectionaries.... Evincing as much theoretical nuance in its engagement with materiality as it does technical rigour in its readings of ecclesial iconography and medieval Greek texts.... His ways of engaging the primary sources are nuanced, captivating and should inspire others.
Jonathan Homrighausen, PostscriptsRoland Betancourt a su renouveler un champ de recherche trop longtemps réduit aux mêmes approches.... Voici un livre qui renouvelle notre regard sur les lectionnaires byzantins, en lien avec la liturgie et l’espace religieux.
Anna Lampadaridi, Revue des études byzantines · In translation: Roland Betancourt has renewed a field of research too long confined to the same approaches… Here is a book that changes the way we look at Byzantine lectionaries, in relation to the liturgy and sacred space.
Reviews
| Venue | Reviewer | Date | Link |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Medieval Review22.08.30 | Vasileios Marinis | 2022 | Read |
| The Byzantine Review4 (2022): 30–33 | Georgi Parpulov | 2022 | DOI |
| Church History92:3 (2023): 696–698 | Stefanos Alexopoulos | September 2023 | DOI |
| Postscriptsreview essay, 13:2 (2022): 235–243 | Jonathan Homrighausen | 2022 | DOI |
| Revue des études byzantines80 (2022): 333–335 (in French) | Anna Lampadaridi | 2022 | DOI |
| Istina67:2 (2022): 250–251 (in French) | Michel Mallèvre | 2022 | Journal index |
| Miller’s Book Review“Books Before Print, Paper, and Pixel” | Joel J. Miller | 24 May 2025 | Read |
