Interpreting Living World in Late Medieval Apologetic Texts: Nature and Body in the Slavonic Translation of John VI Kantakouzenos’ Polemic Texts against Islam
Interpreting Living World in Late Medieval Apologetic Texts: Nature and Body in the Slavonic Translation of John VI Kantakouzenos’ Polemic Texts against Islam

Summary/Abstract: Written after his abdication from the Byzantine throne in 1354, the polemical discourses against Islam and in defence of Christianity by John VI Kantakouzenos (d.1382), were soon translated in the fourteenth-century Balkan Slavic milieu. Typically for the apologetic genre, they present an encyclopaedia of Byzantine theological views, in which exegesis plays an essential role as a technique of persuasion and refutation, and communicates Christian understanding of nature, animals and human body. Kantakouzenos does not invent the interpretations, but choses them from the existing pool of Byzantine exegetic tradition. The paper1 explores some of the ways in which these exegetic components were interpreted and presented by the Slavonic translator and later copyists.

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