The Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography

Volume II: Genres and Contexts

Stephanos Efthymiadis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781351393270
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

For an entire millennium, Byzantine hagiography, inspired by the veneration of many saints, exhibited literary dynamism and a capacity to vary its basic forms. The subgenres into which it branched out after its remarkable start in the fourth century underwent alternating phases of development and decline that were intertwined with changes in the political, social and literary spheres. The selection of saintly heroes, an interest in depicting social landscapes, and the modulation of linguistic and stylistic registers captured the voice of homo byzantinus down to the end of the empire in the fifteenth century. The seventeen chapters in this companion form the sequel to those in volume I which dealt with the periods and regions of Byzantine hagiography, and complete the first comprehensive survey ever produced in this field. The book is the work of an international group of experts in the field and is addressed to both a broader public and the scholarly community of Byzantinists, medievalists, historians of religion and theorists of narrative. It highlights the literary dimension and the research potential of a representative number of texts, not only those appreciated by the Byzantines themselves but those which modern readers rank high due to their literary quality or historical relevance.

PART I
Genres, Varieties And Forms

1

Byzantine Hagiography and its Literary Genres. Some Critical Observations

Martin Hinterberger

The question of literary genres involves, on the one hand, the categorisation and classification of texts by modern scholarship on the basis of precise criteria and characteristic features, and, on the other, the literary practice according to which the writer, one way or another, refers to an extant tradition and texts of reference (or model texts) which he/she follows, adapts, rejects or parodies. However, it also concerns the literary audience and their reception of a text according to their expectations of a particular genre, as developed by former experiences.¹

It is impossible – and possibly even pointless – to set out, in a single chapter and in their entirety, generic questions arising from the study of hagiographical texts from the whole Byzantine period. The small number of studies devoted to this particular topic is a further impediment to formulating general assessments. Yet, despite the undeniable influence exerted by model and authoritative texts, their great variety only allows us to make some very cautious generalisations on the different genres. Although there are many common elements which unite different groups of texts, the general picture remains perplexing. Since, to a large extent, the question of genres involves these common elements, it must be stressed here that, for all their seeming monotony, most texts are distinctive for their particular features, from both a thematic and a linguistic/stylistic point of view. This distinction has to be made, especially with regard to hagiographical texts for which the false belief prevails that they mechanically repeat or modify given topoi without introducing any significant variation. If one examines hagiographical texts as literary phenomena (as they chiefly are!) and not as historical sources, this view is demonstrated to be totally erroneous. In the observations that follow emphasis will be placed on the testimony of the Byzantine authors themselves as well as their readership. A significant indicator of the genre and to which considerable importance will be given is a text’s title, i.e. the label, with which the author or, later on, the scribe (representing an audience) ‘generically’ identifies a text from the outset.

¹ For an introduction to the question of literary genres, see Duff, Modern Genre Theories.

Historical survey of research into Hagiographical Genres

As far as research into hagiographical genres is concerned, the bibliography presented by Christian Høgel in 1997, which amounts to only forty titles, plainly shows that the literary merits of Byzantine hagiography have not yet been acknowledged.² This accounts for the almost total lack of studies on questions relating to hagiographical genres. Even nowadays in most cases the aim of generic analysis is merely to evaluate content from the viewpoint of historicity. Scholars who have treated hagiographical texts as literature feel no less obliged to emphasise the wealth of information that can be derived from them. This tendency has to do with the history of hagiographical studies.³

From the very beginnings of hagiographical studies a keen ideological discussion on the question of genres developed around a single issue. Scholars had to face the question of the provenance of hagiographical texts, namely whether they were associated with earlier or contemporary forms of pagan and Jewish literature or could be regarded as autonomous works of purely Christian inspiration. This question related to both the early Christian texts (such as the Gospels, the Apocrypha and the Passions) and the saints’ Lives exemplified by the vita Antonii. It is widely acknowledged today that there was considerable interplay between the Christian, pagan and Jewish late antique biographies and a shared narrative discourse (discours hagiographique) on the fashion in which a holy man was presented. This discussion is not yet over but it is now being carried on in more moderate terms than before.⁴

Hagiography as a Genre

More often than not, we refer to the hagiographical genre or to hagiography in general. Yet it is questionable if the Byzantines perceived the corpus of hagiographical texts as a separate literary category, and for two reasons: a. Hagiographical texts, in the sense of all texts which offer information on saints, as a whole constitute an assortment of works of miscellaneous and sometimes non-literary content such as, for instance, the documents on/by St Christodoulos of Patmos (BHG 307 and 308). This is a very large and vague category in which the common factor is that, in one way or another, each deals with a particular saint. b. The Byzantines did not make any distinction as to what was hagiographical and what was not; they lived in an integrated, cohesive world where little or no distinction was made between the religious and the secular element. This cohesion is observable also in the literary sphere. Very often classifying works under the label of ‘secular’ or of ‘theological’ literature is the result of a deliberate choice following modern criteria. Thus, ‘real’ funeral orations are regarded as works of secular literature whereas those including miracle narrations are relegated to the religious sphere.⁵ This has led to a confusion which affects the unity of an author’s identity as well as the coherence of a culture. The work of John Geometres, a significant writer of the second half of the tenth century, can be properly discussed in its entirety only if one takes into account the rhetorical exercises, epigrams, his four-line poems and hagiographical verse. The fourteenth-century scholar Nikephoros Gregoras is another case in point. And the same is true for the manuscript tradition of texts; Vaticanus gr. 676 (eleventh century) is the most significant witness to the literary output of John Mauropous as it transmits, on the one hand, his epigrams and letters and, on the other, his hagiographical orations and the Life of Dorotheos (BHG 565).⁶ in the collected, rhetorical works of Theodore Metochites (as in Vindobonensis phil. gr. 95) put together by the author, we find not only enkomia for saints but also a Eulogy to Constantinople together with other ‘secular’ works.⁷ In short, the practice followed by Byzantine authors clearly shows that distinctions mu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Transliteration and Citation
• Abbreviations
• Contributors
• Maps
• Introduction
• Part I: Genres, Varieties and Forms
• Part II: Hagiography as Literature
• Part III: Hagiography and Society
• General Index
• Index of Greek Words
• Manuscript Index