How can something finite mediate an infinite God? Weaving patristics, theology, art history, aesthetics, and religious practice with the hermeneutic phenomenology of Hans-George Gadamer and Jean-Luc Marion, Stephanie Rumpza proposes a new answer to this paradox by offering a fresh and original approach to the Byzantine icon. She demonstrates the power and relevance of the phenomenological method to integrate hermeneutic aesthetics and divine transcendence, notably how the material and visual dimensions of the icon are illuminated by traditional practices of prayer. Rumpza’s study targets a problem that is a major fault line in the continental philosophy of religion – the integrity of finite beings I relation to a God that transcends them. For philosophers, her book demonstrates the relevance of a cherished religious practice of Eastern Christianity. For art historians, she proposes a novel philosophical paradigm for understanding the icon as it is approached in practice.

Find out more about the book here.

About the author

Stephanie Rumpza, Sorbonne Université, Paris
Stephanie Rumpza is a researcher in Philosophy at Sorbonne Université (Paris IV). Her research focuses on the mediation of image, word, and expression and the relation between phenomenological and theological thinking.

The first collective volume of the ERC AGRELITA, Representing and naming Greece and the Greeks (14th-16th centuries) , edited by Catherine Gaullier-Bougassas, has just been published by Brepols.

What do Greece and the Greeks represent for authors and artists of the 14th to 16th centuries in Western Europe? This volume explores this question from the perspective of spatial and geographic perception and imagination. It thus concerns the representations of Greek space, ancient and “modern” from the 14th to 16th century.

By favouring Latin, French and Italian works, written mainly in Italy, France, the Burgundian Netherlands and Greece, it studies how authors and artists represent textually and visually the geography of Greece / space or Greek spaces(s). The difficulties in defining, naming and representing Greece as a territorial entity were numerous during these centuries, marked by very profound upheavals, with the collapse of the Byzantine Empire on the Greek side and, on the Western European side, numerous developments in geographical, historical and also linguistic knowledge, as well as in textual and iconographic forms of expression. The perception of a spatial, geographical identity of Greece is all the more delicate as several temporalities are at stake: that of ancient Greece, that of Greece contemporary to the authors, and that of medieval Greece before the 14th century. The studies brought together question the different perceptions and representations of Greek space, in its unity and/or its diversity, which are expressed and renewed during these three centuries, as well as on the naming of Greek places and the Greece who accompany them.

Find out more about the book and order here.

Table of Contents

Catherine Gaullier-Bougassas, Explorer la réception de la Grèce ancienne sous l’angle de la représentation de l’éspace

I. Connaissances savantes et expériences personnelles

Catherine Gaullier-Bougassas, Les savoirs hérités sur les espaces grecs : les autorités antiques connues dans l’Europe occidentale médiévale

Catherine Gaullier-Bougassas, Images du monde, encyclopédies et traités en langue française (XIIIe -XIVe siècle) : reprises et renouvellements des représentations de l’éspace grec

Emmanuelle Vagnon, Cristoforo Buondelmonti et ses sources dans sa représentation de la Grèce

Constantin Bobas, Imaginaire occidental et réalités orientales de l’espace grec : en voyageant à Rhodes aux XVe et XVIe siècles

Edith Karagiannis-Mazeaud, Géographie du Péloponnèse, aperçu par Belon, Thevet et Nicolay, voyageurs français du XVIe siècle

II. Géographie et histoire grecques

Marilynn R. Desmond, Topographie troyenne dans la Grèce franque du XIIIe siècle

Valeria Russo, Le continuum historique des espaces grecs : les représentations géographiques dans la Fleur des histoires de Jean Mansel  (version courte)

Valeria Russo, Retrouver la Grèce dans le temps et dans l’espace : la Mer des histoires face à la création d’un passé antique

Gilles Grivaud, La Chorograffia d’Etienne de Lusignan : sources et propositions

III. Écritures fictionnelles

Corinne Jouanno, Quelle place pour la Grèce dans la littérature romanesque byzantine (XIIe-XVe siècle) ?

Daisy Delogu, Paysages palimpsestes : les espaces imaginaires grecs dans l’églogue du XIVe siècle

Pascale Mounier, La Grèce de Thésée d’après la Teseida de Boccace et ses adaptations françaises

Clarisse Évrard, « Ancrer sa galee » en Grèce : stratégies textuelles et dispositifs visuels dans l’Histoire de Jason et le Recueil des histoires de Troie de Raoul Lefèvre

IV. Figurations visuelles

Ilaria Molteni,  Imaginer et représenter l’espace grec en Italie au Moyen Âge : le laboratoire de l’Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César

Ilaria Molteni, L’espace grec à la cour de France (1380-1422) : de l’Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César à l’Épître Othéa

Clarisse Evrard, Représenter la Grèce et les Grecs par le prisme flamand : le cas des manuscrits enluminés de la bibliothèque de Louis de Bruges

Marie Jacob-Yapi, L’usage du costume byzantin dans les manuscrits parisiens de matière antique au début du XVe siècle