History in Hagiography: Writing and Rewriting Byzantine Rulership and Imperial Ideology in Miracle Stories (original) (raw)
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The International scientific symposium "Days of Justinian I" is an annual interdisciplinary scholarly forum aimed at the presentation of the latest research followed by discussions on various aspects of Byzantine and Medieval Studies before 1500; this includes the treatment and interpretation of cultural, historical and spiritual heritage in contemporary modern Europe. The Symposium is dedicated to Emperor Justinian I with the aim to bring together scholars from around the world to address a broad range of issues related to Byzantium and the European Middle Ages, comprising the exploration of the cultural and historical legacy as an integrative component of the diversities and commonalities of Europe and wider. This year’s special thematic strand aims to incite scholarly debate about the wide spectrum of ideas and definitions about the "Narratives" and how they were crafted in Eastern Roman Empire and in Medieval Western Europe. Various questions will be addressed in exploring how the narrative stories about particular individuals, groups, people, described the specific things, places and the world, reflected the past and present, the factuality or invention. This will encompass many aspects of narratives and how they functioned on different levels, through which the people of the Byzantine and Western Medieval World gave meaning to their lives and the society, stated their belonging and formed their identities. The symposium will embrace the varieties of political, ideological, cultural, social or religious dimensions of the narratives and how they reflected the lives and identities in the Eastern Roman Empire and Medieval Western Europe, that included the claims to the heritage.
Edited by 3 See in particular William Labov and Joshua Waletzky, "Narrative analysis: oral versions of personal experience", in Essays on the verbal and visual arts, ed. June Helm (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1967), 12-44. 4 I leave to one side the use of the term 'narrative' to refer to the imposition of form on the past, as argued by the 'narrativist' tradition, most clearly by Hayden White, Tropics of discourse: essays in cultural criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), even though the common element-evaluation through language and the construction of a specific 'story'-is apparent. See
2018
Miracles present a central theme in Byzantine prophetic texts. They are associated with eschatological protagonists, most notably with the motifs of the Antichrist and the Savior-Emperor, who are the dominant narrative figures in historical apocalypses, upon which the present study lays its focus. By surveying more than a dozen Byzantine prophecies from the sixth to sixteenth century this study aims to excavate the meaning and implications of miraculous deeds in the longue durée of Byzantine apocalyptic thought. In particular, it is shown how specific miraculous actions and characterizations-attributed to the Savior-Emperor and the Antichrist respectively-are to be read as either homologous or inverted correspondences that emulate biblical precedences of divine beneficial acts. Apocalyptic miracles (and pseudo-miracles) are, first and foremost, constructed as Christocentric typologies that stress the continuation of the miracle accounts known from the Gospels and the Old Testament. Furthermore, it is shown which specific events carried miraculous as well as eschatological connotations for the Byzantines.
Sacred Mobilities in Byzantium and Beyond People, Objects and Relics, edited by Veronica della Dora, Charalambos Dendrinos, Mark Guscin and David John Williams, 2024
This paper explores the miracles effected by two late Byzantine saints, Athanasios I and Gregory Palamas, looking at the geographical distribution of their miracula, the mobility of the beneficiaries to their shrines, and the proxemics and kinesics involved in the stories of healing as reported by their contemporary hagiographers, Theoktistos the Stoudite and Philotheos Kokkinos.