The Hagiography and Hagiographers as the Precursor of the Cultural-Historical Value of the Sanctity’s Virtue
The present paper aims to re-evaluate the prosopographical research in the field of medieval hagiography, with particular reference to the nomenclature and identities of the hagiographers themselves. These writers, translators, and transmitters of saints’ lives functioned as a transregional community of textual agents whose shared philological, theological, and manuscript practices had a significant impact on medieval (biographical) cultural-historical consciousness. Rather than treating hagiography as merely devotional, the study argues that it constituted the central intellectual and cultural matrix from which medieval life writing emerged across the Latin West and the Orthodox East.
Approaching hagiography as a mode of culturally embedded textual production, the paper examines the vita as a narrative facility where language, theology, and cultural memory converge. The characteristic lexicon of sanctity was grounded in biblical intertextuality and patristic conceptualisations, while the creative differentiation (partly formalised) of virtues (intra-lingually and paraphrasically) shaped the content of the hagiographical genre. In the absence of copyright legislation and the concept of exclusive ownership of written compositions, unacknowledged citations, borrowings and copying of patristic authorities constituted a significant element of hagiographic rhetoric and style. In this context it is important to not discard the metaphrasis (not only in Metaphrastic hagiography of 9th century) as the (Byzantine) concept of rewriting and its meaning for the new chapter of the textual (and in-tangibly material) transformation. Self-authorship remains largely submerged yet is discretely enhanced through the individual response to the challenges of the (one’s, divine) destiny and the ultimate (ascetic height) goal of (spiritual) production.
Methodologically, the paper adopts a prosopographical lens to reconstruct hagiographers as historically situated actors embedded in networks of monastic culture, translation, and intellectual exchange. The transmission of vitae – from Greek into Latin, from Byzantine Greek into Old Church Slavonic, and within multilingual monastic environments – formed a sub-European textual network in which hagiographers functioned as theologians, philologists, and cultural mediators; St Maximus the Greek (1469–1555/6) exemplifies this composite role, demonstrating how individual agents navigated and unified multiple cultural and intellectual traditions while preserving and rearticulating hagiographical content in the evocating metamorphic treats, rearticulated across languages.
By analysing shared narrative strategies (such as expressed humility, the vocabulary of humbleness, the encyclopedia of miracles, and intertextual layering of creating the ascetic path) juxtaposed by cultural-historical examination of the reviewed terms, the functioning of the (im-personal) names (cf. Keats-Rohan 2007: 151, 155) in the relation to the differentiated sense of impersonal identity, but with the attention on the written records and their precise reference (as the primary anthroponymic function of the names), the study shows how hagiographical techniques became uncatalogued foundational for medieval biography and continued to shape early modern conceptions of holiness and personal identity/personhood.
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Neža Zajc’s research specialisation is centred on the phenomenon of St Maximus the Greek (1469–1555/6), to the legacy of whom she has been devoting her research for the past twenty years. Furthermore, the scope of her specific research extends to the subsequent historical moments of the periods that are traditionally considered as well-known.
E-mail: neza.zajc@zrc-sazu.si
