Ciborium or Canopy? Textual Evidence on Canopies in the Byzantine Church

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the different idioms, arguments, and rhetorical strategies Greek-speaking Byzantines used to discuss canopies in their churches. It compares the modern academic conventions of naming and describing canopies as ciboria with conventions that are related to the Byzantine tradition. Such an analysis links some of scholarship’s evident lacunae and misunderstandings to the inception of Byzantine studies and its antiquarian approach starting in the sixteenth century and solidified by positivistic scholarship since the Enlightenment. Because the word ciborium was used less often than previously thought and other descriptive and metonymic words also referred to canopies, in this study, the modern term canopy is used as it points to the architectural form. This chapter also highlights the Byzantine intellectual elite’s awareness of the terminology related to canopies as a carrier of complex theological ideas that were deeply associated with the materialization and meaning of canopies in the Byzantine church.