The Burdened Body: Byzantine Enkolpia and the Weight of the Sacred

Abstract

Few products of human artistry seem as insistently concerned with self-representation as jewelry. In Georg Simmel’s classic formulation, articles of personal adornment work to enhance an individual’s social persona by magnifying their Ausstrahlung. While medieval Christian devotional jewels were well-equipped to operate in this manner, their true significance lay elsewhere. Objects such as pectoral crosses, reliquary rings, rosaries, and prayer nuts were designed not so much to mediate between self and society, but rather to stage and facilitate an encounter of the self with itself. Focusing on Byzantine devotional neck pendants, or enkolpia, this essay considers how religiously significant wearables participated in introspective spiritual practices aimed at forming and reforming the Christian subject. The essay, more specifically, attends to the enkolpion as an instrument of self-imposed discipline and explores how the corporeal experience of carrying this object and feeling its weight, however minimal, on the body contributed to the wearer’s cultivation of inner vigilance.