Le Rappresentazioni Sacre Nella Letteratura Bizantina: Dalle Origini al Secolo lX

In Italian. Edges of paper cover a little tattered, spine faded, front cover hinge a little fragile. Some age-darkening, but all pages are tight, intact and unmarked. Addenda page slightly torn.

Inscribed by Prof. La Piana to Josephine Setton, (wife of the distinguished medieval historian K.M. Setton of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study) who helped him with his writing in English.

Giorgio La Piana was an Italian-born American theologian, priest, philosopher, humanist and medieval scholar. He was ordained a Catholic priest in 1900, came to the United States in 1913, began teaching at Harvard in 1916, obtained American citizenship in 1918 and was Morison Professor of Church History at Harvard Divinity School from 1926 to 1948.

La Piana was one of the leading personalities in the modernist religious movement and controversy in Italy at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th.

He and acted as a liaison between American and Italian scholars and intellectuals during World War ll. He was a staunch and outspoken anti-fascist and close friend of Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter.

This is his magisterial study and comparison of sacred representation, including drama, in Byzantine literature, with an emphasis on the differences in between Eastern and Western Christianity. He discuses the origin and history of dramatic homilies, of Christian drama in poetry, and in the third part of the work, of eastern and western religious theater and dramatic presentations, including the contributions of St. Methodius, the church Fathers and other prominent religious and Classical figures.