Περίληψη / Summary
During the period of religious humanism, the anthropocentric view of the world and the need for cultural and educational reform alters the ideological correlations of the era and imposes ‒ apart from the return to classical works ‒ the “discovery” of the moral cleanliness of the texts, which implies the purity of the Church in the first centuries of Christianity. The main representatives of the era exercise the preservation as well as the promulgation of the biblical and patristic texts through one of the most typical activities of Renaissance Europe: translation. In this way we have a systematic study of Greek and biblical works on the one hand, and on the other we have the formation and cultivation of the written usage of the vernacular language. The focus of my research is the Cretan theologian and formidable scholar Maximos Margounios, Bishop of Kythera, and his translation activity into the vernacular. Margounios’ initiative to translate into simple Greek and print St. John Scholasticus’ «Κλίμαξ Παραδείσου» (1590), an edition co-funded with Emmanouel Glizounis and dedicated to the Ecumenical Patriarch Jeremiah II, is set within the context of theological issues that afflicted the ecclesiastical life of the East in the second half of the 16th century. In this article I aim to shed light on an important figure of the Greek literature of the era as well as his activities, the popularization and the translation of fundamental texts of theological literature that has only recently begun to attract the interest of researchers. Emphasis is placed on the general trend that is observed at the end of the 16th century of translations of classical and Byzantine texts into the vernacular, as well as their contribution to the spread of education throughout the Greek-speaking world. Finally, specific indicative extracts of the translation that deal with the linguistic choices of the translator (lexical choices, grammatical and syntactic structures), the accuracy of the translation, and the objectives of Margounios’ endeavor are showcased.
