The Hagiographic Traditions of Late Antiquity (original) (raw)
Hagiographies and the History of Medieval Ethiopia
History in Africa, 1981
The hagiographic literature of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church may be divided into two major categories: the translated lives of the saints and martyrs of the early Christian church and the lives of local saints. The essentially foreign works, which constitute the first of these groups, will be of only peripheral concern in this paper. While books such as Barlaam and Joasaph, The Life of St. George, and The Conflict of Severus did serve as models for the traditions dealing with local saints, they are of little interest to the student of Ethiopian history.The most interesting of these local hagiographies are those about saints who lived between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. These traditions, which recount the lives of some kings and many monastic leaders, are of great importance for the reconstruction of the history of medieval Ethiopia. As Conti Rossini has written, The more I preoccupy myself with the history of Ethiopia, the more I realize the importance of the study of lo...
Hagit Amirav, Cornelis Hoogerwerf and István Perczel (eds), Christian Historiography Between Empires (4th-8th Centuries) /Late Antique History and Religion 23; Beyond the Fathers 3/, 2021
This study presents the thesis that Christian hagiography was conceived of as a historiographic genre by the founder of the Christian historiographic tradition, Eusebius of Caesarea. It argues for the importance of the Neoplatonist Porphyry's attack on the Christian world-view both by advocating an eternally revolving unchanging world order and by accusing Christianity to be a subversive innovation. As a response, Christian intellectuals have elaborated a philosophical defense of the creationist and redemptionist world view conceiving of a linear and vectorial time, which goes from creation through the redeeming Incarnation toward the Second Coming of Christ. It was within this framework that Eusebius founded new historiographical genres, namely Chronography, Ecclesiastical History, and Hagiography. The article briefly analyses the characteristics of these new genres, with special emphasis on the seemingly contradictory role of founding the narrative on good documentation, on the one hand, and giving an important role to the miraculous, on the other. The second part of the study treats three case studies of hagiography as historiography: Eusebius' and other authors' treatment of Constantine's vision before the battle at the Milvian Bridge in 312, Cyril of Scythopolis' treatment of the Samaritan war of 529-30, and Eustratius of Constantinople's treatment of the circumstances of the appointment of Patriarch Eutychius of Constantinople in 552. The article is also an exercise in reading hagiographical sources critically for our own historiographic endeavours.
The hagiographical Experiment: Developing Discourses of Sainthood, ed. by Christa Gray and James Corke-Webster, 2020
This paper deals with late antique vitae whose heroes belonged to the clergy, and particularly with the questions of for whom and for what these texts were written. In order to introduce this issue, however, I will begin with monastic hagiography. While this volume argues that it would go too far to say that the lives of holy monks gave rise to the very idea of writing the stories of the Christian saints, there is not much doubt that they started the interest in those personages whose merits lay in their life, and not in their martyrdom. What was the purpose of these writings? Hippolyte Delehaye, whose name we still quote with reverence and justly so, defined hagiography as literature written in order to launch, promote, or maintain the cult * The research on this article has been supported by a grant from the National Science Centre (Poland, DEC-2013/10/E/HS3/00202) and by the ERC Advanced Grant The Cult of Saints: a Christendom-wide study of its origins, spread and development up to 700 (COS) run by Bryan Ward-Perkins at the University of Oxford with partnership at the University of Warsaw. of a saint. 1 Interestingly, this definition does not fit well with majority of the earliest lives of holy monks. In the Life of Antony, written most probably in the 360s, which set the rules for the genre, we find neither an exact date of its hero's death nor the localisation of his grave which, as the author tells us, remains hidden. 2 Thus two pieces of information essential for the development of the cult, two coordonées hagiographiques, as Delehaye calls them, are missing. Moreover, there are only few miracles in this text and none of them is posthumous. 3 Thus, the Life of Antony was certainly not written to start a cult. Athanasius tells about his purpose directly -he writes in order to provide an example of virtue and askēsis to be followed by those who entered upon a noble rivalry with the monks of Egypt. 4 And the contents of the Life of Antony, including a long sermon addressed to his pupils, show that this was really the goal that the author had in mind. 5 The cultic ambitions, which can be found in several early martyrdoms, are absent from other early vitae as well. There is no trace of them in Jerome's lives of Paul and Malchus, both written not long after the Life of Antony. 6 Only in the last of his monastic vitae, that of Hilarion, dating from the early 390s, does Jerome try to construct the cult of his hero, but even here the parenetic function is dominant. 7 It does not mean that the lives of the holy men of the desert were composed just for the training of the monks, but the monks were certainly an important, intended, and real audience which sought this kind of literature. It suffices to mention the Rule of Benedict, which recommended them to read the vitae patrum, which are 'the instruments whereby well-living and obedient monks attain to virtue '. 8 In this article, I want to raise the question of whether the lives of saintly clerics had a similar function; whether they were written in order to provide their colleagues or followers with a role model. The writing of clerical vitae started quite early. The first life of a bishop, the Vita Cypriani, was composed probably shortly after its protagonist's death in AD 258 and so somehow preceded the heyday of hagiography by over hundred years. Its author, Pontius of Carthage, explains that he aims to describe the life of a man who, not only in his death, but also in his life was an incomparable example to others. 9 Pontius emphasises the priesthood of his hero and claims that since Cyprian was a martyr and bishop he should be honoured more than those martyrs who were simply lay people and catechumens. 10 Still, Cyprian did suffer 1 Hippolyte Delehaye, Les Légendes hagiographiques (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1955, 2nd ed.), 2. 2 Athan. V. Anton. 90-2. 3 Athan. V. Anton. 54-65. 4
Catholic Social Science Review, 2017
Many people think of a "saint" as someone who lived centuries ago, failing to consider the possibility that there may be among their contemporaries people who the Church will one day canonize as saints. Yet there are researchers who are charged with the difficult task of investigating the lives of contemporary candidates for sainthood. Little has been written about the research methods employed by these investigators and scholars. For the most part, authors have written about dealing with ancient or medieval sources, or have attempted to explain hagiography from the perspective of sociology or psychiatry. This paper will examine some of the issues facing the researcher and writer who is exploring the lives of contemporary candidates for canonization, and will raise for consideration some of the challenges they face.
(Texts and Studies in Eastern Christianity; XXI), Postscript by Hartmut Leppin., 2021
The studies composing this book are written by twenty nine scholars from USA, Switzerland, Sweden, Russia, Netherlands, Italy, Israel, Great Britain, Germany, France, Belgium and Armenia. They explore the transmission of apocrypha in Ethiopia, Egypt, the Holy Land, Syria, Iran, Armenia, Asia Minor, the Balkans, the Slavic world and Italy. Frequently rejected by Churches, apocryphal texts and legends had their own process of development, often becoming a medium of literary, artistic and ritual elaboration. Apocrypha also inspired esoteric thinking. Kindred apocryphal themes can be observed in Judaism since Late Antiquity. The book investigates the common roots of such traditions, as well as the interactions of Judaism and Christianity with Mystery cults and with the religions of Iran. Dissenting groups, such as the Samaritans, the followers of John the Baptist and the mediæval dualists, are also considered. Local adaptations of Biblical stories reveal the interests of the narrators, the painters and their intended audiences, which often conceived of themselves as living not in a post-Biblical era, but in direct continuity with Biblical heroes. Reviews: P. Lanfranchi, in Rivista di Storia e Letteratura Religiosa 58/1 (2022), 139-42; M.H. Sellew, in Church History. Studies in Christianity and Culture 92/2 (2023), 417-19; Network for the Study of Esotericism in Antiquity (17.06.2021).