Cuvântul și sabia. Patriarhul Alexandriei, Gherasim Palladas (1688-1710), un reprezentant al școlii veneto-cretane în ţările române (II)
The word and the sword. Gherasim Palladas, Patriarch of Alexandria (1688-1710) as representative of the Veneto-Cretan school in Romanian Principalities

Summary/Abstract: Could we imagine in the 17th Century a new „literary Byzantium”, as deeply entrenched in the oral tradition and as interested in communicating itself as the original one? Or, on the contrary, we should rather think that the byzantine literary legacy was revived making recourse to scholarly tools borrowed from the modern Republic of Letters? The second part of this paper tried to solve this conundrum by a thorough analysis of The Panegyric of St Constantine the Great, authored by GherasimPalladas, patriarch of Alexandria. The second part is devoted, in the same vein, to identifying the sources and to a hermeneutics of another work attributed to Palladas, In praise of the Word (Ms. BAR 766). On a first level of interpretation, the inquiry continues to charter the cultural network that brought together intellectuals in Bucharest, Constantinople, Venice and the Near East as well as the next level probes Palladas' style (topoi, loci communi, critical irony) and writing technique (compilation, amplification, metaphrasis, paraphrases). The deconstruction of his Panegyric reveals that the text exceeds its own established byzantine genre and takes in different cultural traditions and epistemic frames (classical Antiquity, the Veneto-Cretan school, European classicism and, blatantly, Baroque) that amount to poetic and encyclopaedic compendium.

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