Translatio and Objecthood: The Cultural Agendas of Two Greek Manuscripts at Saint-Denis

Abstract

In tracing the histories of two Greek copies of the complete works attributed to Dionysios the Areopagite, known as the Corpus Dionysiacum, this article considers the kind of agency exerted by medieval books as distinct from other art objects mobilized in the cross-cultural diplomatic arena. An examination of the entangled social lives of these two Byzantine books sent from Constantinople to the abbey of Saint-Denis outside Paris as imperial gifts in the ninth and fifteenth centuries reveals their transformation over time as objects of translatio akin to sacred relics in the negotiation of political, hagiographic, and humanistic agendas, and, further, in the cultivation of medieval patrimony in the service of medieval kingship and modern statehood.