The Old Slavonic Digenis Akritis: Its Origin, ‘Formulaic Style,’ and Problems of Its Edition, with Robert Romanchuk (Florida State University), University of Cambridge, November 2, 2018, 11:00 am–3:00 pm

The workshop will explore the Old Slavonic version of the 12th-c. Byzantine “romantic epic” Digenis Akritis -- a text of considerable importance to Byzantine, Slavonic, and oral-traditional studies. The Slavonic Digenis, produced in 13th-c. Ukrainian Galicia or 14th-c. Macedonia, represents the work’s only consistently epic extension and the earliest uncontested witness of Slavonic epic composition. A distant cousin of the long-winded Grottaferrata version, it expands on the material of their concise Greek common ancestor by means of oral-traditional formulas and themes found in near-contemporary and later Greek and Slavonic folksong. It presents the editor of a critical text with a number of sui generis problems.

Robert Romanchuk (PhD Slavic, UCLA 1999) is Pribic Family Associate Professor of Slavic and Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at Florida State University and a 2018–19 HURI/Ukrainian Studies Fund Research Fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. His fields are philology and psychoanalysis.

The workshop, a collaborative undertaking of Cambridge Ukrainian Studies and Byzantine Worlds Seminar, will be led in English; all interested postgraduate students and scholars of medieval history and culture are welcome to attend. The event is free but online registration is required. Register by October 22, 2018.

Participants may apply for reimbursement of costs for domestic economy train/coach travel to and from Cambridge.