Agapios Landos and the History of the Book: Orthodox Spirituality in Print
(2025) Gennadeion Seminar, American School of Classical Studies at Athens — Location: Athènes (27.February.2025)
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- (en) This presentation examines the spiritual and editorial enterprise of Agapios Landos (1585–1656) as a key case study for rethinking the history of Early modern Orthodox spirituality through the lens of book history. A Cretan religious writer active between Mount Athos and Venice, Landos was among the first Greek spiritual authors to privilege print over manuscript in order to disseminate devotional literature in the vernacular Greek language. Between 1641 and 1700, his works generated at least sixty-two editions, marking an unprecedented editorial success within the seventeenth-century Greek-speaking world. Landos’s publishing activity unfolded in a context shaped by the rivalry between Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant initiatives. His major work, Ἁμαρτωλῶν σωτηρία (1641), as well as his vernacular Psalter with Theodoret’s commentary (1643), must be interpreted not merely as devotional texts but as part of confession-building processes in the Greek Orthodox Church. This intervention argues that the history of the book is an indispensable methodological crossroads for Church history, showing through the editorial enterprise of Agapios Landos how Orthodox spirituality, confession-building dynamics, and socio-economic networks of the seventeenth-century Greek Mediterranean can be reconstructed by combining critical textual scholarship with analytical bibliography and graph-based modelling.
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Kovalenko, I. (2025). Agapios Landos and the History of the Book: Orthodox Spirituality in Print. Gennadeion Seminar, American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Athènes. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/271775