Worldliness in Byzantium and Beyond: Reassessing the Visual Networks of Barlaam and Ioasaph Cecily J. Hilsdale The Medieval Globe, Volume 3, Issue 2, 2017, pp. 57-96 (Article) Published by Arc Humanities Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/758486 [ Access provided at 27 Sep 2021 07:49 GMT with no institutional affiliation ] 57 WORLDLINESS IN BYZANTIUM AND BEYOND: REASSESSING THE VISUAL NETWORKS OF BARLAAM AND IOASAPH CECILY J. HILSDALE of the global turn in art history, scholars redirect attention from if, as ParT 1 “roots” to “routes,” then manuscript studies—as traditionally defined—might be in trouble. Conventional approaches have focused on the former, tracing recension schemas in an attempt to recreate the pictorial programs of lost archetypes from later copies, charting lines of pictorial “influence.” Individual manuscripts, accord- ing to this line of thought, are valued primarily2 as “witnesses” to lost originals as part of an always- elusive recuperative agenda. 3 While many scholars have offered cogent critiques of this genealogical method, the quest for origins still looms large, especially for manuscript traditions that span multiple cultural contexts. The shortcomings of this method are thrown into especially sharp contrast by Barlaam and Ioasaph the corpus of manuscripts that form the core of this essay: the illustrated Greek copies of , a high- drama edifying tale based loosely on the life of the Buddha and translated into a staggering number of languages from around the medieval and early modern world. Specialized studies have attended to individual recension programs and modes4 of translation, while cross-cultural overviews showcase the tale’s wide currency. Alongside this wide terrain of text- ual diffusion is a significant, and somewhat unwieldy, body of visual material. Of the roughly 160 surviving Greek manuscripts of the text, a dozen were conceived In addition to an anonymous reader, I would like to thank the following colleagues for con- versations about the topic or feedback on the piece, whose shortcomings remain my own: Barbara Crostini, Shannon Gayk, Aden Kumler, Amanda Luyster, Peggy McCracken, Christina Normore, Jonathan Sachs, and especially Carol Symes. While Brooke Andrade and Sarah Harris of the National Humanities Center offered bibliographic assistance at the early stages of this project, Alexandra Kelebay, Catherine Becker, and Columba Stewart were instrumen- tal in sourcing the final images. This research was funded by a grant from the Social Sciences and1 Humanities Research Council of Canada. Routes Objects See Clifford, “Traveling Cultures” and “Diasporas” in . This paradigm is taken up productively2 by Flood, Illustrations.. 3 For example, Weitzmann, For example, Dolezal, “Elusive Quest” and “Manuscript Studies.” See also Lowden, “Transmission.”4 In Search Lopez and McCracken, . The Medieval Globe 3.2 (2017) 10.17302/TMG.3- 2.4 pp. 57–96 58 58 CeCily J. hilsdale as illustrated copies; their pictorial programs first5 received systematic attention from Sirapie Der Nersessian, whose study of 1937 is complemented by the recent critical edition of the Greek text by Robert Volk. Both are firmly anchored in a roots- origins approach: Der Nersessian imagined a singular (lost) iconographic prototype of ca. 1000, whereas Volk posited five versions of the text and three distinct pictorial cycles. In addition to the illuminated manuscripts themselves, imagery drawn from the legend has found its way into a variety of other artis- tic contexts around the globe. Despite much rigorous scholarship, however, our understanding of this diffuse visual corpus is still somewhat fragmentary, and issues of transmission overshadow virtually all other potential research questions. This essay synthesizes some of this material in order to reflect on the cre- ative adaptation, particularization, and local inflection of a medieval cultural kosmos phenomenon so widespread as to be truly global—in a very medieval6 sense. The “world” as figured in the Greek encompasses a range of concepts from adornment and aesthetics to world order and the universe itself. Drawing on such expansive associations, worldliness will serve as this essay’s key heuristic Barlaam and Ioasaph and Byzantium—the Greek- speaking eastern Roman Empire—as the epicentre of cultural encounter from which the story of acquired a worldwide appeal. Moreover, the diffusion of its iconography, which has gener- ally been understood as a one-way migration from the east to the west, is more accurately captured through a study of multiple routes, rather than through a teleology that reduces Byzantium to a mere storehouse for rich source material on its predetermined journey towards western Europe. This, of course, is part of a much larger effort to address the problematic narrative of Byzantium’s “influence” on European art, in which Byzantine material is viewed as conservative and static, in contrast to innovative and dynamic Western adaptations of it. On the contrary, my study’s emphasis on mondialisation worldliness reveals the nuance, mutability, and political repurposing of such materials, and their role in acts of7 , a term that stresses ongo- ing processes of world formation. To this end, Sharon Kinoshita has adopted “worlding” as a critical and destabilizing interpretive stance, one that stresses 5 L’Illustration Die Schriften VI/ 1 Die Schriften VI/ 2 Barlaam and Ioasaph Der Nersessian, (hereafter Der Nersessian); Volk, (hereaf- ter6 Volk) and (hereafter ). Epigram Finkelberg, “On the History,” treats the ancient philological context of the word; Drpić, kosmesis , discusses its meanings in Byzantium, especially regarding epigrams as adornment (7 ). Creation Key here is Nancy, . See also Flood et al., “Roundtable.” 59 59 worldliness in byzanTiUM and beyond 8 contingency rather than the inevitability of (modern) globalization. In the con- text of the present study, this worlding is ironically carried out through the changing forms of a tale that purportedly advocates the renunciation of the worldly. In what follows, my analysis moves from the textual peregrinations of the story itself to the permutations of the related visual material in multiple contexts within and beyond Byzantium, to see what kinds of worlds they create and navigate. From Enlightenment to Edification Kitāb Bilawhar wa Būḏāsf Balavariani Barlaam and Ioasaph Barlaam and Josaphat Known in Arabic as the , in Georgian as the , in Greek as , and in Latin as , the differ- ent versions of the story share the same basic premise and plot structure in order to promote a message of worldly renunciation and conversion. Echoing the narra- tive of the Buddha’s enlightenment, it tells how a prediction of the young prince’s destiny prompts his father, the king of India, to shield him from all signs of pain and mortality: an endeavour that proves futile when the prince ultimately chooses the spiritual over the material. Despite many other points of convergence with the Buddhist story, the Christian and Muslim versions fundamentally alter the narra- tive by introducing the figure of an ascetic teacher who plays a pivotal role in the prince’s 9spiritual journey, in contradistinction to the solidary enlightenment of the Buddha. The privileging of this spiritual advisor, Bilawhar or Barlaam, in the titles of all versions of the tale underscores this profound shift in focus from enlighten- ment to edification—not only of the prince but also the reader, for whom the text becomes the teacher. The legend of the Buddha’s life is thought to have traveled from India as part of the cultural traffic along the Silk Roads, where it might have been translated from Sanskrit (or another Indian language) into Pahlavi (Middle Persian) and Kitāb Bilawhar wa Būḏāsf then combined with a variety of Arabic literary sources and sermons to become10 the compiled in ninth- century Abbasid Baghdad. The 8 9 Kinoshita, “Worlding” and “Painter, Warrior,” on the connected historiespaideia of Marco Polo. See e.g. de Blois, “On the Sources.” The importance of Christian is stressed by Crostini, “Spiritual ‘Encyclopedias’,” 213– 29, esp. 227; as well as Crostini, “Eleventh- Century Monasticism,” 216– 30. I would like to thank the author for sharing this essay with me in advance10 of itsLe publication. Livre Gimaret, , offers an extensive study of this Arabic narrative, its diverse source materials, and variations. My account of the story’s transmission is simplified for clarity: for example, I do not discuss the Manichean fragments of the text nor do I elaborate the stemmas of the different versions. 60 60 CeCily J. hilsdale first extant written version of the story was thus part of the Abbasid translation movement, the significance of which cannot be overemphasized: in the famed “House of Wisdom,” scholars in Baghdad collaborated on translations, interpret- ations, and scientific writings that fueled profound developments in all areas of Kalila wa Dimna 11 Pañcatantra knowledge both within and beyond Islamic lands. (This route parallels that of , another collection of moral tales, the , which was translated into Arabic from the Sanskrit through a no- longer extant Pahlavi inter- Kitāb Bilawhar12 wa Būḏāsf mediary. ) While the tale’s moral import is clear, the religious orthodoxy of the is ambiguous. There is only one brief mention of Islam in the text; no reference to Muhammad; and the ascetic tenets13 that form the basis of the prince’s instruction are called merely “the Religion.” In the later Greek and Latin Christian versions, as in the Arabic, the plot is more of a pretext for Bilawhar’s teachings, which are elaborated as a series of parables. Balavariani The first extant Christian iteration of the tale, indeed, was adapted into an emphatic account of monastic triumphalism. This was composed by Georgian monks in Jerusalem, probably at Mar Saba, in the tenth century: a time and place when the story’s celebration of asceticism would have resonated strongly. Here, “the Religion” is identified explicitly as Christianity, with the royal father, King Abenes, cast as “a man of strong pagan14 beliefs” persecuting the “hated servants of Christ” in an effort to protect his son.