The book is mainly concerned with Patristic ideas about the spiritual needs of the human soul and indicates how Byzantine, apocryphal, and other religious literature and iconography referring to saints have expressed their preoccupations with the issue. It introduces a case study that suggests that following the emergence of the Bogomils in the Balkans and later of the Cathars in Europe,1 both being movements that emphasised the spiritual to the detriment of the material and denied a fully human nature to the historical Jesus, mainstream Christianity countered their views and cultivated a dramatic focus on the body as the epitome of human-divine interaction. As a response to and a reflection of these happenings, another phenomenon took place: the iconography along the Via Egnatia during the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries witnessed the occurrence of a new subtype within the established typology of Eleousa/Eleusa—the depiction of holy women breastfeeding their offspring. The novelty of the current study consists in the fact that it connects developments in visual representations and the praxis of the Byzantine Church with the occurrence of the Bogomils.
The work is also a commentary on the Scriptural, Patristic, medieval, apocryphal, and iconographic sources that concern nourishment, which is understood to be at the same time biological and spiritual. It also refers to historical persons and to documented events which took place within and on the fringes of the “more or less fixed entity”2 that was the Byzantine Empire. It attempts to situate saints, facts, images, legends, and metaphors in their socio-cultural context.
The volume also suggests a methodological approach that could aid researchers to analyse historical, theological, cultural, and other developments in Europe in a more nuanced manner: in addition to the currently prevalent East-West distinction taken into consideration in such enterprises, researchers should also bear in mind a North-South division that, as we shall demonstrate, is apposite in many situations. This is not, in itself, an entirely new thought either for historiography or, as shown in the Preface, for me personally. As remarked, the idea is present in both Gibbon and Brown’s above-mentioned works. Here are Gibbon’s arguments to support it: “The distinction of North and South is real and intelligible … But the difference between East and West is arbitrary and shifts round the globe.”3 As we shall see, in the matter of European hagiography, following the North-South division is the most appropriate strategy. Since this volume is concerned with St. Anne in three chapters, the distinction is relevant to the topics undertaken. For Brown himself it suggests that “the history of the Christian church in late antiquity and in the early middle ages is far more a part of the history of the Mediterranean and its neighbours than it is a part of the history of the division of the Mediterranean itself between east and west”. He acknowledged his indebtedness for this notion to other scholars, thus: “I would like therefore to hark back to the perspective of Henri Pirenne, in his Mahomet et Charlemagne. Whatever the weakness of Pirenne’s thesis […], his [Gibbon’s] intuition on the basic homogeneity of Mediterranean civilisation deep into the early middle ages still holds good.”4An article from 1976 may look obsolete, but I do not think that this one is; all of Brown’s intuitions have proved correct in both the short and long term. Averil Cameron also supports the idea of homogeneity around the Mediterranean when speaking about the occurrence of saints and holy men; for her, their cult appeared simultaneously in places around this sea.5 Moreover, one can even today clearly notice uniformity among the countries in that geographical area from the perspective of how they display their religion and, more generally, their culture. The shared Byzantine heritage and the communication network, together with the trade and cultural exchanges these facilitate, are among the factors that have contributed to this state of affairs.
A methodological aspect worth alluding to, even though it will not be developed further in this book, is the periodisation of history. I suggest that perhaps we should not be overly meticulous about it because the time ascribed to each historical “stage” varies almost from country to country—this is certainly the case with respect to what goes by the name of “the European Middle Ages”. My research and teaching in three countries, two in Europe and one on the North-American continent, have taught me that the best way to deal with this issue is simply to state in our publications which specific century (or even year?) we are referring to. Thus, the readers will be able to classify events according to the convention regarding historical and temporal divisions that have already been accepted in their own countries and institutions, while still interacting easily with the international scholarly community.
Focusing now on the main topic of the book, nourishment and milk-feeding, we shall say that the case of Anna lactans (Galaktotrophousa/Mlekopitatelnitsa6) can be illustrated through a direct and empirical method of evaluating the textual, pictorial, and other sources that, while discussing milk, also touch on the wider theme of the relation between spiritual and biological. As noticed above, intriguingly, the churches that contain depictions of St. Anne feeding her child are located solely along the Egnatian Way and had their decorative programme made within a documented period of 200 years (or at most 300 years if some suppositions are to be taken into consideration7); various and intense interchanges took place along this historical route in the temporal interval the publication covers.
As said, I connect the apparition of this phenomenon with the occurrence of the Bogomils, or more precisely with the period of maximum expansion of the Bogomils in the Balkans at the end of the eleventh century and throughout the twelfth; it took a while for the ideas to spread and for a counter-reaction to develop, but certainly when the last remains of the Bogomils waned, the visual rendering of Anne suckling her infant daughter ceased (the last—at least surviving—image is that from Ohrid, 1361).8 Because of their anti-materialistic stance, as will be shown in Chap. 8, the Bogomils did not believe in the sacraments of the Church and disregarded pictorial accounts of the holy. It is very probable that the first iconographers to carry out a representation of breastfeeding (or their patrons) felt the need to counter such a theology by allowing for an emphasis on the human body as well as for more illustrations of the temporal world in their works. For them, a holy woman nursing was the quintessence of the idea of the earth and heaven coming together since the biologically produced milk points to the Divine nourishment and Christ himself has been seen “as Mother”.9
In the book, a connection is also made between the circulation of sentimental images of St. Anne, such as that of the Selbritt10 in the rest of Europe (German lands, Austria, France, Belgium , Italy—only a few isolated cases h...