Byzantium beyond Byzantium: What about Greek(s) in Eighth-Century Italy?, in Global Byzantium. Papers from the Fiftieth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Birmingham March 2017, Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies Publications, L. Brubaker, R. Darley, D.K. Reynolds (eds.), Abingdon-on-Thames and New York, Routledge, 2022, 39–58

The present chapter, consciously adopting a geographically limited approach when compared to the global preoccupation of the symposium, will address the use of the Greek language and the dissemination of an accompanying religious culture in central Italy between the seventh and eighth centuries. This will be done through the prism of Latin homilies on the Virgin Mary, in particular for the feast of the Purification of Mary and Presentation of the Christ Child in the Temple. The feast is also known as Candlemas, and in Greek as the Hypapante, that is the ‘meeting’ of the Holy Family with Symeon and Anna in the Temple of Jerusalem as narrated by the Gospel of Luke (2, 22–40). Arguing against the historiographical tendency that posits a political, cultural, and linguistic disconnection between Byzantium and Rome after the advent of Latin popes, beginning with Stephen II (752–7), I will bring new elements to the discussion. These elements can assist in measuring the impact, integration, or even the disappearance of that extraordinary mixture of cultures which characterised Byzantium and its ‘provinces’. In fact, despite the notion of a fading knowledge of Greek in eighth- and ninth-century Rome, ideas and beliefs about the Virgin Mary still travelled between the East and the West. This transmission, which was probably facilitated by eastern monks and clerics, as well as western pilgrims coming back from the Holy Land, managed to overcome the growing linguistic barrier between Greek and Latin. It should not be forgotten that in the early Christian period and the Middle Ages, Greek was the vehicle of a Christian religious culture deeply rooted in the Mediterranean region. The homiletic genre especially, being very conservative, reflected this religious culture for centuries. Seventh- and eighth-century Greek and Latin homilies for Marian feasts, however, also succeeded in sowing the seeds of innovative developments in the understanding and celebration of the Virgin Mary. With this in mind, I will offer here a preliminary analysis of homilies on the feast of the Purification of Mary and the Presentation of the Christ Child. These homilies, which hint at important and long-lasting theological developments in the conception of Mary’s role in the history of salvation, will be used as an index to the transmission and circulation not simply of texts, but of ideas and beliefs in the Mediterranean. We shall see how these homilies are witness to an enduring legacy of Byzantium ‘beyond’ Byzantium.