Kassia

Kassia, also known as Kassiani, Cassia, or Ikasia, was a ninth-century Byzantine abbess, poet, composer, and hymnographer. She was born in Constantinople to a wealthy family in the early ninth century and received an unusually thorough education in both classical and Christian letters. While still a young woman she corresponded with the monastic theologian Theodore the Studite, who praised her learning and her courage in defending the veneration of icons during the second period of Byzantine Iconoclasm. Contemporary and later sources indicate that she suffered corporal punishment for her iconophile stance.

A famous episode, recorded in Byzantine chronicles, places her among the candidates at a bride-show held for the emperor Theophilos in the early 830s. When the emperor approached her with a golden apple and observed that through a woman came forth the baser things, alluding to Eve, Kassia answered that through a woman came forth the better things, alluding to the Mother of God. Theophilos then chose Theodora instead. Whether or not the dialogue is historical in every detail, Kassia did not marry. After the restoration of icons in 843 she founded a convent in Constantinople, west of the city near the Constantinian Walls, and became its abbess.

Kassia is the only woman whose hymns entered the standard liturgical books of the Eastern Orthodox Church in significant number. About fifty liturgical compositions are attributed to her, of which modern scholarship generally accepts some two dozen as authentic. The best known is the Hymn of Kassiani, the doxastikon sung at Matins of Holy Wednesday, written in the person of the sinful woman who anointed the feet of Christ. She also wrote secular verse, including epigrams and gnomic poems, which survive in Byzantine manuscript collections. Her musical settings are among the earliest works by a named medieval composer that can still be transcribed and performed from surviving notation.

She is venerated as a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church, and her feast is kept on 7 September. Later local tradition on the island of Kasos claimed her tomb, but the more secure historical evidence locates her life, her convent, and her death in Constantinople in the middle of the ninth century. Kassia’s combination of theological literacy, poetic craft, and independence of mind has secured her a distinctive place in Byzantine religious, literary, and musical history.