This book explores diachronically how the emotion of compunction (κατάνυξις) was presented, performed, and perceived in liturgical hymns. Mellas achieves this by drawing on recent studies in the history of emotions and on recent scholarship in Βyzantine hymnography, as well as thoroughly contextualizing the analyses of the hymns with insights from aesthetics, musicology, theatre studies, and, not least, from the theological treatises on compunction by the fathers of the Byzantine/Orthodox tradition.
The book is divided into five chapters. After an introduction focused on the definition of compunction, M. sets out to establish the liturgical context in which the hymns were performed in the second chapter, choosing as time and place for the investigation the Early to Middle Byzantine period and Constantinople. The following three chapters are each devoted to particular poet and hymnic genre: Chapter 3 to Romanos the Melodist and his kontakia (sixth century); Chapter 4 to Andrew of Crete and the Great Kanon (seventh to eighth century); and chapter five to the nun Kassia and her monostrophic sticheron on the sinful woman (ninth century). The book ends with a brief conclusion summing up the results of the investigation. The conclusion is followed by a glossary of words related to Byzantine hymnography and liturgy, a bibliography, and an index. The book is well written, albeit somewhat dense and compressed at times.
Overall, this book is a very important contribution to Byzantine hymnography as well as the history of emotions. My criticisms are concerned mainly with M's methodology. M. adapts from Sarah McNamer a method which combines empirical research and ‘informed speculation’ (p. 25). At times, this informed speculation turns into mere speculation or overinterpretation of the sources. This is especially the case concerning the melodies of the hymns. For instance, M. concludes the section on the melodies of the kontakia with this highly speculative assumption: ‘even if a member of the congregation had not talent in singing, the action of listening to the sacred narrative and melody of a hymn, and hearing the voices of its biblical exemplars, opened a shared world of “aural images” that were impressed upon the heart’ (p. 111). I think this assumption, sympathetic as it might be, is problematic: would a member of the congregation in the sixth to tenth centuries or later even grasp all the words? would the melodies and modes elicit the same affective response? would a person who could not sing not feel excluded? Likewise, addressing the melody to Kassia's sticheron, M. writes: ‘The sacred melody, with its occasional cadential melismas, represented the ladder of tears that link God and the world, allowing music to become a medium of transfiguration’ (p. 168). This claim is not substantiated with musicological evidence that would shed light on how composers treated compunction in melody and therefore remains pure speculation or outright overinterpretation.
When it comes to his methodology, M. does not engage much with recent literary and cognitive studies discussions on the emotions, as he explicitly states that he does not want to impose a ‘second-order discourse on Byzantium and its liturgical performances’ (p. 24). I understand this need to study the past in its alterity to avoid the danger of presentism but M. does use several concepts from modern theory such as ‘affective mysticism’(pp. 60–3), ‘chronotopos’ (p. 158), ‘liminal experience of gender’ (p. 159), and he asserts that the Great Kanon ‘deconstructed the rational and irrational, inner and outer, sensory and intelligible’ (p. 139), without engaging with the theory behind these concepts.
In the analyses of the poets and their hymns, the chapter on Kassia and her sticheron stands out as the most thorough: here, M. devotes considerable space to one single, short poem and offers a very good close reading of the sticheron. The chapter on Andrew of Crete's Great Kanon, a hymn consisting of no fewer than 250 stanzas, necessarily has to choose which stanzas to present in the analysis, but the excerpts are surprisingly few. This may be due to the fact that there is no scholarly edition of the Great Kanon, so M. has had to work with different manuscripts in his analysis.
The chapter on Romanos is a bit more compressed. Rather than devoting space to close readings of one or two kontakia, M. traverses ten in a few pages (pp. 85–108). M. does indeed demonstrate, using these examples, how compunction is an important theme in the poetry of Romanos. However, compared with the Great Kanon and Kassia's sticheron, the kontakia have a much stronger narrative and dramatic unity. This narrative aspect is missing in M's analyses, and I believe that it would actually strengthen the conclusion had he taken the plots of the kontakia into consideration and not just the instances where the word compunction is used. Compunction is part of the plot in, for instance, the kontakion ‘On the Victory of the Cross’, where Hades quickly realizes that the crucifixion of Christ entails his defeat. The Devil, however, blinded by his own haughtiness, only discovers the reality of the Crucifixion too late. He too shows a kind of compunction seeking refuge in Hades. To my mind, the analyses of the kontakia of Romanos would have benefited from a close reading of a few kontakia in toto, including such devices as plot and dialogue, and making occasional references to other kontakia as appropriate.
Besides these critical remarks on methodology and analysis, a few minor details arise: some quotations of ancient and Byzantine authors are only given in English without the Greek text (pp. 7, 14–15, 81, 107, 108, 110 and 133). Notwithstanding, M's study of compunction as a liturgically performed emotion in Byzantium is an important contribution to Byzantine hymnography and the history of emotions.
