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“Elissa as a New Dido: Greece, the East, and the Westward Movement of Culture in the Decameron
Christopher Livanos, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
“Heliotropia 7.1-2
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Elissa as a New Dido: Greece, the East, and the Westward Movement of Culture in the Decameron
Βoccaccio’s age was one of two periods marked by large-scale emi-gration of Greek intellectuals westward. The better-known period is that of the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 and its aftermath, when Greek-speaking refugees brought their learning and their native language with them to Italy and other lands where most people belonged to the Ro-man Catholic Church, or the “Latin Church” as Greeks of the time would have called it.
Less widely discussed but equally important was the influx of Greeks to the West some one hundred years earlier in the aftermath of a theological controversy between the Monk Gregory Palamas and Barlaam of Calabria, best known to scholars of Italian literature as the man who tried to teach Petrarch Greek and might have succeeded had he not died in 1348. Bar-laam was a brilliant dialectician and a subtle philosopher, the type of man Petrarch would have admired. He is regarded today by the Eastern Ortho-dox Church as a heresiarch. In 1351 he was anathematized. His followers, whose ranks included many if not most Byzantine intellectuals, had little choice but to convert to Roman Catholicism from Eastern Orthodoxy and, under most circumstances, move to a region not under the jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Constantinople.
The controversy between Barlaam and Gregory Palamas originated when Barlaam made a disparaging remark about certain ascetic practices undertaken by Greek Orthodox monks.1
1 The standard study of Palamas’s theology is John Meyendorff, St. Grégoire Palamas et la mystique orthodoxe (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1959)…
Christopher Livanos, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
“Heliotropia 7.1-2
24grammata.com/ free ebook