Heavenly Sustenance in Patristic Texts and Byzantine Iconography

Elena Ene D-Vasilescu is a Tutor and a Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, UK. Her teaching and research focus on Patristics and Byzantine Studies. She is the editor of Devotion to St. Anne in Texts and Images (2018), and co-editor, with Mark Edwards, of Visions of God and Ideas on Deification in Patristics Thought (2016). She has also published other books and many articles; among the most recent of her articles there are “Generation (γενεά) in Gregory Nazianzen’s poem On the Son” (2017); “Early Christianity about the notion of time and the redemption of the world” (2017), and “Late Developments in Meta-Byzantine Icon-Painting” (2017).

• Chapter 1. Introduction.- Chapter 2. The Connection Between Heavenly Nurture and Biological Sustenance in the Ancient World.- Chapter 3. Other Faith Encounters and Instances of Milk Nourishment.- Chapter 4. Anne’s Veneration as a Part of the Cult of the Saints.- Chapter 5. Patristic Texts about Saint Anne’s Role as an Intercessor with Regard to the Alleviation of People’s Barrenness and Healing in General.- Chapter 6. St. Anne as the Prototype of a Saint Connected with Healing and Nourishing in Various Literary Sources, Including the Apocrypha.- Chapter 7. Anna lactans/Galaktotrophousa Iconographic Motif Between the Twelfth and the Fourteenth Centuries.- Chapter 8. The Bogomils and Iconography.- Chapter 9. Conclusion.