Hagiography in the Byzantine Empire

Abstract

Hagiography is the literary genre represented by the texts written in honor of a saint or a group of saints and unfolding as shorter or longer accounts of their biography, martyrdom, and/or other manifestations of their confession of faith. Derived from the components hagios (saint) and graphe (writing), hagiography is a term coined by European scholarship, not a word used in the premodern era in the sense and implications it has acquired today. Hagiography as practiced in the Byzantine Empire had a long and rich history between the 4th and the 15th century. In Late Antiquity it emerged as a distinct genre, developing from simple forms to works of rhetorical sophistication and spreading into different parts of the eastern empire. The bulk of late antique hagiography produced there consists of texts written in Greek; yet Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, and Arabic also arose as languages of hagiography both inside and outside the borders of the Byzantine state, as an expression of Christianity in the lands where these languages were spoken. From the 8th century onward, and with the shrinking of the eastern empire, Greek acquired the monopoly on literature at large, a development that affected hagiography too. But Georgian and Slavonic texts were added to the production of eastern Christian hagiography, with a significant output including both translations from a Greek original and original works chiefly celebrating local saints. From the Byzantine millennium (330–1453) there are preserved upward of 2,500 Greek hagiographic texts. This estimate is based on the texts listed in the inventory of the Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca. Although in their majority they have been transmitted anonymously, a fair portion of those preserved with an author’s name derive from major figures of Byzantine letters. The most influential and perhaps most enigmatic among them was Symeon Metaphrastes. His reworking of earlier hagiographies in the late 10th century and the creation of a collection arranged according to the months of the church calendar (the Menologion) marked a turning point in the history of the genre and its dissemination in Byzantium.