International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

Jaakko Olkinuora
University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland; 
[e-mail]
Re-Defining the Liturgical Functions of Canon Poetry
The history of Byzantine hymnography is currently being rewritten: new discoveries of 
unpublished texts and alternative theories for the development of hymnographic genres characterize 
contemporary scholarship on Byzantine literature. While there have been recent contributions on 
the liturgical history of the canon, interpretative aspects are widely neglected. As a part of this quest, 
the liturgical functions of canon poems need to be re-defined. The present paper suggests new 
methodological approaches to analysing the genre of canon poetry, drawing on performance theory 
and the different aspects of communication between the hymnographer-chanter and his audience.

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501
Przemysłav Marciniak
University of Silesia, Katowice, Poland; 
[e-mail]
Hypokrisis
and 
Mimesis
– Byzantine Concepts 
of Theatrical and Non-Theatrical Imitation
In a 
scholion
to a fragment of Lucian’s treatise 
The Dance
Arethas tells a story of some young 
people who imitated a possessed person and, as a consequence, ‘they were not restored from this 
state but departed with this wretched imitation’. This story, one among many, shows that both 
hypokrisis 
and 
imitation
, understood as ‘pretending to be someone else’, were treated with suspicion 
in the Byzantine period. In my paper I intend to discuss how these concepts were understood by 
Byzantine writers – my main body of evidence comes from the 12
th
century where authors such 
a Eustathios of Thessalonike, John Zonaras and Theodore Prodromos discussed 
hypokrysis 
both 
from a historical perspective and as a part of the daily life. I will also argue that this mixed attitude 
towards 
hypokrisis 
might have been partially responsible for the lack of theatre in Byzantine times.