The Hagiographical Experiment: Developing Discourses of Sainthood throws fresh light on narratives about Christian holy men and women from Late Antiquity to Byzantium. Rather than focusing on the relationship between story and reality, it asks what literary choices authors made in depicting their heroes and heroines: how they positioned the narrator, how they responded to existing texts, how they utilised or transcended genre conventions for their own purposes, and how they sought to relate to their audiences. The literary focus of the chapters assembled here showcases the diversity of hagiographical texts written in Greek, Latin, Coptic, and Syriac, as well as pointing out the ongoing conversations that connect them. By asking these questions of this diverse group of texts, it illuminates the literary development of hagiography in the late antique, Byzantine, and medieval periods.
| Preface |
|
vii | |
| Abbreviations |
|
viii | |
| Introduction |
|
1 | (28) |
|
|
|
|
|
PART 1 The Persons of Hagiography |
|
|
|
1 The First Hagiographies: The Life of Antony, the Life of Pamphilus, and the Nature of Saints |
|
|
29 | (34) |
|
|
|
2 The Hagiographer as Holy Fool? Fictionality in Saints' Lives |
|
|
63 | (30) |
|
|
|
3 Clerical Hagiography in Late Antiquity |
|
|
93 | (28) |
|
|
|
PART 2 The Forms of Hagiography |
|
|
|
4 Eremitic aemulatio: Genesis of Genre in Jerome's Vita Pauli |
|
|
121 | (27) |
|
|
|
5 A Life Beyond Measure: Sulpicius, Martin and the Possibilities of Perpetual Discourse |
|
|
148 | (28) |
|
|
|
6 The Perils of Paulinus: Letters as Hagiography in the Correspondence of Paulinus of Nola and Sulpicius Severus |
|
|
176 | (23) |
|
|
|
7 Hagiographical Compilation as Literature: Receiving Saints, Recrafting Heroes, Redeploying Theologies |
|
|
199 | (32) |
|
|
|
PART 3 The Strategies of Hagiography |
|
|
|
8 How to Persuade a Saint: Supplication in Jerome's Lives of Holy Men |
|
|
231 | (25) |
|
|
|
9 Holy Fools and Sacred Sidekicks: Comic Relief and Humorous Elements in a Hagiographical Text from Egypt |
|
|
256 | (19) |
|
|
|
10 Disclosing Secret Chaste Marriages in Jerome's Life of Malckus and Stephen the African's Life of Amator |
|
|
275 | (25) |
|
|
|
11 The Hagiographer's Craft: Narrators and Focalisation in Byzantine Hagiography |
|
|
300 | (33) |
|
|
|
|
|
333 | (6) |
|
|
| Index |
|
339 | |
Christa Gray, D.Phil. (2012), University of Oxford, is Lecturer in Classics at the University of Reading. She is the author of Jerome, Vita Malchi: Introduction, Text, Translation, and Commentary (OUP, 2015), and co-editor of two volumes on Roman Republican oratory.
James Corke-Webster, Ph.D. (2013), University of Manchester, is Senior Lecturer in Roman History at King's College, London. He is the author of Eusebius and Empire: Constructing Church and Rome in the Ecclesiastical History (CUP, 2019), jointly awarded the 2018 Conington Prize.
