Authors

Adelina Angusheva-Tihanov¹;  ¹ The University of Manchester, UK

Discussion

In the mid-eighteenth century, Josef Bradati (d.ca.1789), a monk from Rila monastery, and few decades after him, Nicodemos of the Holy Mountain (d.1809), both produced a number of works against magic practices, witches, and common superstitions. In doing so, the two preachers resorted to a variety of earlier sources, from Biblical excepts to Patristic sermons, from hagiographic narratives to apocryphal texts. The paper explores the intricate nature of their compilations, and analyses the functions of the textual hybridity that incorporates not only different genres, but also various discursive modalities, including preacher’s reproaches and imagined responses of their opponents. While the texts by both writers offer a valuable glimpse at the eighteenth-century hybridisation of beliefs mixing Christian traditions with popular superstitions, pagan rituals, and even Islamic practices, these witnesses cannot always be taken at face value. The paper explores how and why the two preachers both disclosed and distorted the presentation of the agents and religious experiences in the late Ottoman Balkans.