Resounding Martyrs: Hymns and the Veneration of Saints in Late Antique Miracle Collections (original) (raw)

2023, Interacting with Saints in the Late Antique and Medieval Worlds (Brepols)

In this chapter, I look at a mostly neglected aspect of the late antique cult of saints — hymns and prayers addressed to them, and/or performed at the sites of their veneration. Hymns and prayers as part of saints’ cult are spectacularly absent both in the (post)-Brownian scholarship and in studies of early Byzantine hymnody. As I suggest, this neglect arises out of particular methodological choices that centre academic attention on hymns as authorial, literary output, rather than on the lived experiences of late antique Christians interacting with saints. In order to re-gain, and understand, these experiences, I turn to miracle collections in Greek from various regions of the late antique Christian Mediterranean, from Egypt to Constantinople and to Seleucia (primarily the Miracles of Cosmas and Damian, the Miracles of Thekla, the Miracles of Artemios, but also other collections). These texts, I argue, reveal that performing hymns and addressing prayers to, and in honour of, saints constituted the core of the ritual experience of engaging with saints and martyrs, a sine qua non of establishing a mystical bond with them, and structured the ritual behaviour when visiting healing martyrs’ shrines and elsewhere.