The Fruitful Vineyard of Prayer. A Critical Edition of the Anthologium gnomicum by Elias Ekdikos (CPG 7716)

This project further develops previous research conducted at the Institute for Early Christian and Byzantine Studies (Leuven) on Byzantine encyclopaedism, which concludes that the term ‘encyclopaedia’ should be abandoned in favour of that of ‘compilation’ or ‘collection’. The project narrows the focus to a particular kind of compilation literature: theological collections of small chapters or capita grouped into larger entities. This genre is represented by the Anthologium gnomicum, a collection that is also known as the so-called Capita alia. This text is of uncertain authorship: in the manuscript tradition one encounters attributions to John of Karpathos (6th or 7th c.), to Maximus the Confessor (6th-7th c.) as well as to Elias Ekdikos (11th or 12th c.). The project aims to offer the first critical edition of this text, (a) providing a description of the codices, detailing their date, provenance, contents, and history, and (b) completing the classification of the witnesses on the basis of text-internal elements, such as binding and contrasting variants, as well as text-external elements, such as their history, binding, and the placement of the Anthologium in the codex, in order to (c) assess the family relations between the codices and thus establish the stemma codicum. Next, the Anthologium will be studied and compared to cognate compilations, with a focus on inner structure (how to explain the chapters’ seemingly random sequence?), external characteristics and the author’s communicative intentions (especially theological and literary).

Publication year:2015

Accessibility:Closed