The Hagiographical Experiment: Developing Discourses of Sainthood

Erscheinungsjahr 2020
ISBN: 978-90-04-42132-5
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 158, 342 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 651 g

Reihe: Vigiliae Christianae, Supplements

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Weitere Mitwirkende

Gray, Christa

Corke-Webster, James

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Christentum, Christliche Theologie Christentum/Christliche Theologie Allgemein
• Geisteswissenschaften Christentum, Christliche Theologie Kirchengeschichte Hagiographie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface

Abbreviations

Introduction

James Corke-Webster and Christa Gray

Part 1 The Persons of Hagiography

1 The First Hagiographies: The Life of Antony, the Life of Pamphilus, and the Nature of Saints

James Corke-Webster

2 The Hagiographer as Holy Fool? Fictionality in Saints’ Lives

Julie Van Pelt

3 Clerical Hagiography in Late Antiquity

Robert Wisniewski

Part 2 The Forms of Hagiography

4 Eremitic aemulatio: Genesis of Genre in Jerome’s Vita Pauli

Alan J. Ross

5 A Life Beyond Measure: Sulpicius, Martin and the Possibilities of Perpetual Discourse

Zachary Yuzwa

6 The Perils of Paulinus: Letters as Hagiography in the Correspondence of Paulinus of Nola and Sulpicius Severus

Michael S. Williams

7 Hagiographical Compilation as Literature: Receiving Saints, Recrafting Heroes, Redeploying Theologies

Todd E. French

Part 3 The Strategies of Hagiography

8 How to Persuade a Saint: Supplication in Jerome’s Lives of Holy Men

Christa Gray

9 Holy Fools and Sacred Sidekicks: Comic Relief and Humorous Elements in a Hagiographical Text from Egypt

Konstantin M. Klein

10 Disclosing Secret Chaste Marriages in Jerome’s Life of Malchus and Stephen the African’s Life of Amator

Klazina Staat

11 The Hagiographer’s Craft: Narrators and Focalisation in Byzantine Hagiography

Anne Alwis

12 Postscript

Lucy Grig

Index

Über Autor(innen)

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.