Early Palaiologan Hagiography: “Old” and “New” Saints under the Shadow of Symeon Metaphrastes

Abstract

This article focuses on the hagiographical rewriting from the Palaiologan Period. Having outlined the corpus of relevant texts, the author discusses the two paradigms that currently permeate the scholarship dealing with the Late Byzantine hagiography, the “old saints” paradigm and the “metaphrasis” paradigm. Both approaches, despite their indisputable heuristic value, do not take into consideration all aspects of hagiographical rewriting in the period in question. The first paradigm is not adequate because, first, it is virtually impossible to determine how great the chronological distance between the hero and the text must be to make him or her “old”, and, second, because the life of old saint does not amount to a rewriting; vice versa, a rewritten text does not necessarily mean that we are dealing with the life of old saint. Regarding the second approach, the term “metaphrasis” inevitably creates an association with the metaphrastic Menologion, which is not entirely justifiable because the early Palaiologan hagiographic corpus differs from it minimum in four important ways: these texts are often transmitted in authorial collections (instead of menologia); they were composed on occasion (instead of being part of a prearranged program); they have individual (instead of collective) authorship; the rewriting techniques allow for major alterations in the contents and are rarely limited to passage-for-passage transposition.