Dal pulpito al codice: la genesi dell’omiliario di Gregorio Palamas

The volume presents Gregory Palamas as editor of his own works while preparing the third volume of his complete works, thereby reorganizing and arranging the Homilies for their definitive publication. The identification of the author’s manuscript enables close study of the corrections and revisions undertaken and of the copies subsequently executed, and has also shown how Gregory continued to work on them through further interventions, additions, and new corrections. Moreover, it has been possible to observe how he reorganized his Homilies – which in some cases were originally occasional discourses tied to specific places and events – according to the liturgical year, reproducing the established model of the patriarchal homiliary (beginning with the Sunday of the Publican). He thus intervened concretely, modifying the titles or deleting from the rubrics any mention of the occasion on which the homily had been delivered. Comparison with other late Byzantine homiliaries from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries immediately reveals the singularity of Gregory Palamas’s homiliary. The majority of other homiliaries are preserved in a single manuscript (or at most two) that comes directly from the author or from his metropolis, whereas the manuscript tradition of Gregory’s homiliary is significant from the outset and attests to its extraordinary diffusion, far greater than that of his other works.