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Poetic Context: Byzantine Forms and Liturgical Function
Byzantine poetry is an intricate constellation of liturgical, theological, and rhetorical practices. Far from existing as a purely literary genre, Byzantine hymnography was embedded in ritual performance, monastic temporality, and theological exegesis. Poetry in Byzantium was thus a performative and interpretative act — a way of shaping religious feeling, articulating doctrinal positions, and mediating between the human and the divine. Within this highly formalised tradition, Kassia stands as a distinctive poetic voice whose work reconfigures what hymnography can do and how it can sound. [1]
Byzantine hymnography drew on inherited classical rhetoric, scriptural typology, and evolving musical forms. Genres such as the sticheron idiomelon or the kanon structured liturgical time as much as they structured poetic expression. As Andrew Mellas (2020) argues, the emotional intensity of Byzantine hymnography is inseparable from its ritual context, where chant and embodied performance shape the reception of the text. Poetry was therefore not merely recited but enacted — a rhythmical and affective choreography situated within the communal life of the church.
Kassia’s poetry participates fully in these conventions yet continually presses against them. Her work demonstrates how the liturgical poem could become a site of profound introspection, emotional ambivalence, and even subtle theological critique. [2]
Kassia within the Byzantine Poetic Tradition
Although hymnography was dominated by male monastic authors, Kassia’s corpus reveals a distinctive manipulation of genre norms. Rather than relying on stereotypically penitential tropes, her verse often cultivates a heightened interiority that foregrounds the complexity of affective life. Mellas (2020) describes her On the Sinful Woman as an imagistic poetics of "compunction" in which the interplay of tears, silence, and longing produces a theological drama of absence and desire.
Her language is both rhetorically sophisticated and emotionally immediate. The structure of her hymns often hinges on balancing biblical allusion with introspective commentary, producing a layered poetic persona. This layering is especially evident in the way she incorporates hesitation, pause, and intensification — almost a rhythmic “breathing” within the text. Such features signal an awareness of how poetry functions when sung in communal ritual, where silence and sound become part of the interpretative apparatus.
Kassia’s contribution can be understood not simply as the work of an exceptional individual but as an intervention in a broader poetic field. Her hymns highlight the flexibility of Byzantine liturgical forms: that the sticheron, for instance, could accommodate not only doctrinal exposition but also introspective lament; that the liturgical poem could carry a subtle critique of moral and social dynamics through imagery rather than explicit statement.
Her secular epigrams further demonstrate her command of the concise, aphoristic style characteristic of Byzantine moral poetry. Their thematic range — from folly and virtue to the ethics of speech — aligns with the intellectual currents of her time while revealing a sharp, often ironic sensibility. As Beaton (1989) notes, the epigram in Byzantium served as a locus for rhetorical experimentation and moral reflection, and Kassia’s contributions exemplify this flexibility.
Entangled Poetic Realities
One of Kassia’s most significant innovations lies in the emotional and theological density of her verse. Her poetry foregrounds affect not as an ornament of devotion but as a mode of theological knowing. In the Holy Wednesday hymn, for example, repentance is presented not as submission but as yearning — a movement toward divine presence shaped through gesture, touch, and silence. Such emphasis on affect resonates with the synaesthetic theology of Byzantine chant, where vocality, sound vibration, and poetic imagery jointly produce religious experience. [3]
Kassia’s poetry, then, does more than convey doctrine. It structures feeling. It choreographs the tensions between sin and forgiveness, desire and fulfilment, absence and divine intimacy. In this respect, she not only participates in Byzantine hymnography but expands its expressive and theological possibilities.
Understanding Kassia’s place in Byzantine poetry requires recognising the entanglements that define her work: ritual practice, theological discourse, rhetorical training, and the phenomenology of sung performance. She operates within a poetic assemblage where voice, chant, manuscript transmission, and monastic temporality intersect. Her poems are not simply texts but events — rhythmic, emotional, communal.
Within that assemblage, she stands as a singular and indispensable figure: not exceptional because she is a woman, but because she reveals what Byzantine hymnography could achieve when its forms were inhabited with acute emotional intelligence and poetic precision.
Notes
[1] There is a rich body of literature around Byzantine poetry. For more recent studies see Papaioannou 2021, particularly Chapter 15. See also Lauxtermann 2003, 2019; Rhoby and Zagklas 2019.
[2] For important studies around Kassia's poetry and hymnography, see amongst others, Mellas 2020, Touliatos-Banker 1984, Tripolitis 1992, Tsironis 2003, Zugravu 2013.
[3] For a discussion of synaesthesia in Byzantine writings, see Betancourt 2018, particularly Chapter 11.
Beaton, Roderick. (1989). The Medieval Greek Romance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Betancourt, Roland. (2018). Sight, Touch, and Imagination in Byzantium. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Lauxtermann, Marc, D. (2003, 2019) Byzantine Poetry from Pisides to Géomètres, vols. 1&2, Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press.Mellas, Andrew (2020) “Kassia” in Liturgy and the Emotions in Byzantium, Cambridge University Press, pp. 141-168. Papaioannou, Stratis. (2021) (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press).Rhoby, Andreas and Zagklas, Nikolaos (2019) (Eds.), Middle and Late Byzantine Poetry: Texts and Contexts (Turnhout: Brepols). Touliatos-Banker, Diane (1984) “Women Composers of Medieval Byzantine Chant” . Journal of College Music Society, College Music Symposium 24 (St. Louis, MO: Universty of St. Louis, pp. 62-80. Tripolitis, Antonia (ed. & trans., 1992) Kassia: The Legend, the Woman, and Her Work. Garland library of medieval literature, New York.Tsironis Niki (2003) “The body and the senses in the work of Cassia the Hymnographer: literary trends in the iconoclastic period”, Byzantina Symmeikta, 16, pp. 139‑157.Zugravu, Gheorghita (2013) Kassia the Melodist. And the Making of a Byzantine Hymnographer, PhD thesis, Columbia University
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