The author, who is currently a lecturer in in liturgical studies at Yale University Institute of Sacred Music and Yale Divinity School, here presents the printed version of his (2018) Notre Dame doctoral dissertaton. It is a close and highly detailed scrutiny of an unusual fifth-century rite of the Orthodox liturgical tradition which has survived even into the present in the form of a hymn from Vespers, ‘For the Earthquake’. When Constantine had conquered Maxentius, and thus Rome, at the battle of the Milvian bridge in 312, he realised that victory was far from equating to mastery and very quickly set in motion his grander vision to relocate the capital eastwards, moving in stages from Nikaia and Nicomedia, and eventually to the Bosphoros which he rightly saw to have immense strategic advantages. He founded Constantinople there in 324 and dedicated it as the new capital in 330. There are always downsides, however, and one of them was that the site was exactly on the North Anatolian Geological Fault, which meant that the city experienced a great number of earthquakes across its long history. Some of them shook the earth and made the inhabitants tremble; others were devastating to life. The quake of 25 September 438 was particularly frightening (though not massively destructive) as it continued for many hours, leading to most of the city (then approximately 200,000 people) pouring out of the city environs from the Golden Gate and assembling on the great open military field (campus tribunalis) at the Hebdomon suburb, seven miles out in the countryside. Here the senior officials, along with Archbishop Proclus, organised extensive prayer services to petition God to end the quake and save the city and their own lives. Like so much else in Constantinopolitan liturgy, the event (fundamentally a service of repentance for sins) became institutionalised and repeated annually at the Hebdomon. Roosien lays out for us the shape of the original service in the form of Vespers, Matins, Psalms appointed for the eucharist, and special hymns written for the occasion which involved a long extent of time making that processional pilgrimage back to the countryside (pp. 29–30 and Appendix A, pp. 170–5). The ritual was, of course, repeated regularly on each occasion of a major quake afterwards. The Old Testament texts chosen for the service focus on the ‘shaking of the earth’ (for example, Jeremiah ii.7-12) as a theological symbol of divine anger at the faithlessness of the people. The ‘people of Israel’ are now, liturgically speaking, the Christians of Constantinople. The prevalence of this liturgised theology of divine chastisement and prophetic repentance left little room for other reflections to be developed, but the author notes how the later emperors (especially Theodosius ii in 447) began to lead the procession to initiate the service, and thus assume the role of leader of the new chosen nation: leader of repentance in the kingly person of the ‘New David’ who in turn secured the return of the blessing and favour of God on behalf of the people. Roosien contrasts this version of imperial repentance-theology with the older corporate one, to characterise it as an attempt to reinforce a Christian version of the ideology of Rome’s ‘eternal victory and perpetual peace’ (p. 75). I was not so sure that such a clear polarisation as that could be drawn: both elements being part and parcel of how the Byzantines saw themselves as appropriating the Old Testament paradigms of the elect nation and the God-favoured king. Later chapters consider how, from the seventh to eighth centuries, the focus turned once more towards the role of Mary the Theotokos and intercessory saints as helpers in time of disaster. One of these saintly helpers (the Vita of Symeon Stylites is given as evidence) is said to have composed a hymn that, if sung, was efficacious in averting danger from earthquakes (p. 116). The great earthquake of 740 produced a new development where, the author notes, the theological response of the liturgical hymns newly composed for Matins (by Joseph the Hymnographer of Hagia Sophia), attempts to move beyond an explicatory polarity of chastisement and repentance, towards a consideration of why, in general, there are such natural disasters in human life, and how there may be more than one way of needing to respond to the crises (p. 143). The author’s overall conclusion is that the long history of the Byzantine rite, in this instance, shows no harmonised conclusion as to why the Kosmos (the harmonious divine order of the world as Byzantium celebrated it theologically) should be so punctuated by the terrifying violence of the earthquake, but he notes how the immense power of the complex liturgy of the imperial city reinforced its self-understanding as ‘a saturated topos, a site of theophany, a holy locale, even if it was problematic for some due to the rite’s emphasis on sin and repentance’ (p. 167).

Overall this is an elegantly constructed and fluent study that, although turning around an apparently narrow founding-concept, proves to be an engaging and often gripping read that turns up suggestive insights for a number of other Byzantine issues. The extent of the sources reviewed throughout was very generous in scope and the rich bibliography was a model of its kind. An important book for serious libraries.