For a Lexical Analysis of Maximus the Greek’s Works

Abstract

Michael Trivolis’ life history, together with his fervent activity as a translator, lead us to speculate on the particular attention that he was to pay to lexical features in his own works, regarding, for instance, the attribution of new and/or different meanings to traditional lemmas or the introduction of new terms. In order to verify this hypothesis, we examined the occurrences within his works of some key concepts from medieval and humanistic culture. This paper focuses on the terms pазумъ and самовласть/самовластие in the texts included in the first two volumes of the new edition of Maximus the Greek’s works edited by N.V. Sinicyna. The results of the survey are compared with the reconstructed semantics and contexts of use of the chosen words in previous literature, on the basis of the occurrences in the historical section of the National Corpus of the Russian language as well as in a selection of dictionaries of Old Slavonic and Church Slavonic. The analysis allowed us to highlight the deep knowledge of the church fathers, on which the thought of Maximus the Greek was based, and the important role of his Italian experience and the knowledge of Savonarola’s works in his intellectual training.