Ildikó Csepregi’s Incubation in Early Byzantium: The Formation of Christian Incubation Cults and Miracle Collections is the first systematic analysis of incubation as the concept and practice were reconceived and institutionalized in the early Byzantine world. The book advances the study of Christian healing practices by bridging philology, hagiography, and the history of medicine, and reconstructing the transformation of temple-sleep traditions from their Graeco-Roman antecedents into the cultic and literary life of Eastern Christianity. The book comprises ten chapters, an introductory chapter, and a concluding chapter, a bibliography, and an index. The monograph unfolds in three parts: Part I—Cults and Records, Part II—Sources, and Part III—Stories.
From the very start of chapter 1, “Greek Incubation,” Csepregi makes clear that the ritual treatment of dreams had two purposes: “oracular and curative” (21). The author then locates Christian incubation within these ancient oracular and therapeutic purposes and practices, with an emphasis on the continuity and adaptation of pre-Christian incubation into the cults of healing saints such as Kosmas and Damianos. Through an impressive synthesis of archaeological, liturgical, and textual evidence, the author demonstrates that incubation was restructured to conform to Christian soteriology while preserving identifiable aspects of its pre-Christian form. In this initial chapter, Csepregi summarizes incubation in classical antiquity, emphasizing Asclepius, comparing him with Christ, and elaborating on other Graeco-Roman medical practices.
In chapter 2, “The Literary Background of the Collections,” which is quite succinct but detailed (13 pages), the author does not look for literary continuity but instead focuses on ritual practice that “itself demanded to be expressed in a very similar form” (43). In other words, later Christian texts’ adherence to the ancient form suggests a narrative pattern inherited from the ancient type, but one that made the development of Christian practice depend on its own rules (56). In the third chapter, “The Christian Incubation Saints,” we move to Christian contexts and aretalogies, specifically those of saints who performed miracles (Thecla, Cyrus, and John, Kosmas and Damianos) to survey how incubation sites evolved around martyr shrines. This is accomplished through a thorough examination of inscriptions, pilgrimage narratives, and miracle collections—a pagan, pre-Christian site with its own narratives and architectural structures often appears in the background. For example, Csepregi writes that in the case of Aegae, which had a famous Asclepeion, “we are dealing with the quite smooth transmission of cult memory, as Thecla’s hagiographer in the mid-century still seemed to know the records of the temple of Asclepius that Libanius mentioned in his letters...he managed to turn the pagan background into a positive hinterland, a source of legitimacy and credibility for Thecla’s miraculous powers” (67). The sites of incubation were important and often included sleeping accommodations or adjacent areas designated for those seeking healing, which were incorporated into a larger context of pilgrimage, relic veneration, and the increasing authority of Christian sanctuaries.
In Part II—Sources, the processes of narrative formation are examined, with a focus on the interactions between authorial intervention, material culture, and oral tradition. Chapter 4, “Material Sources,” tackles, among numerous components of material culture, the Iamata (healing narratives), which are stelae that not only convey the healing stories but also, as sources for those narratives, influence their development. These Iamata and related icons had a variety of roles “in the formation of the miracle stories” and in effecting “cures” (122). The fifth chapter, “The Oral Traditions in the Miracles,” explores how the texts suggest oral transmission, what motivated the sharing of miraculous stories, the potential oral sources, the likelihood of orality within the texts, and how sharing the narratives might have influenced or altered the miracles. The focus here is on the relationship between the oral tales told by pilgrims visiting the sites and their formation into written collections of miracles. The author pays particular attention to the role of hagiographers, who curated not just the visions of miracles but the miracles themselves to underline the theological importance of the saints’ intercession. These incubation stories were curated to retain the visionary element, but the figures in the dream were saints rather than pagan gods. The healings were the result of divine grace rather than the efficacy of ritual actions alone. She also considers material sources, such as dedications and votive offerings, which preserved memory of incubation experiences in non-literary form. The last chapter in Part II, “The Hagiographers,” is particularly strong in its explanation of the hagiographer’s role in shaping incubation accounts to serve pastoral, theological, and polemical ends, as Csepregi writes: “Less openly, the hagiographers reveal a mixture of motivations and reasons for their work, sometimes personal matters and hatreds, and elsewhere more elevated convictions” (175).
Part III—Stories, which begins with the seventh chapter, “Compositional Structures in the Miracle Collections,” provides close readings of miracle narratives, emphasizing the narrative structures that authenticate the saint’s healing power, resolve the tensions of coexisting medical and ecclesiastical authority, and situate the miracle in the larger economy of pilgrimage and cult. The chapter is subdivided into sections that cover the credible and the incredible, compositional structures, and individual characteristics of the collections (those of Thecla, Cosmas and Damian, Sophronius’s Thaumata, and Saint Artemius). Chapter eight, “Narrative Techniques and Variants of Dream Stories,” analyzes “recurrent story patterns, themes, and motifs,” which originate in the “inherent rules of miracle writing” and the “peculiar skill of the hagiographer” (219). The chapter begins interestingly with a brief look at Vladimir Propp and the applicability of the familiar Proppian schema to healing miracles, which is due more to the “richness of the pattern itself than to its particular relevance to the hagiographic materials” (221). In her analysis, Csepregi includes devices such as wordplay, riddles, enigmas, dialogue, object-finding, “Outsiders as Helpers and Healing Outside the Sanctuary,” punishment miracles, dreams versus phantasia, and the function of dreams in the narrative. These miracle stories were designed to point to the saint’s agency. Chapter nine, “Doctors and Miracles,” examines the recurring motif of doctors—sometimes real, sometimes allegorical, sometimes appearing in visions—who allowed hagiographers to negotiate the relationship between medical and spiritual authority. The saint, as a superior healer who outperforms physicians, both appropriates and displaces traditional medical discourse. The tenth chapter of the book, “Mirroring Society and its Beliefs: Sinners, Pagans, Jews, Heretics, Non-Christians in Terms of Illness and Cure,” proposes that the narratives include reference points that “contrast and confirm their own message, but they also reflect the actual surrounding social reality” (263). The chapter reads incubation miracle tales as social texts to demonstrate how dream-healing narratives stage encounters with “outsiders” (pagans, Jews, heretics, skeptical physicians) to affirm saintly power and orthodoxy. In the concluding chapter, Csepregi comments that Byzantine incubation narratives contain a unique fusion of inherited ritual and a developing Christian imagination. In contrast to an earlier tradition of healing that they simply extended, these narratives demonstrate how ancient incubation's sensory and symbolic vocabulary was activated in Christian containment to create a hybrid form that is both devotional and very ancient. Csepregi proposes that the saint’s healing power would be embodied through patterns reminiscent of the cult of Asclepius: a sustained conversation between body, dream, and faith in which the ritual and narrative form were coevolved to keep alive the sacred experience of cure (287-288).
Incubation narratives were not merely records of cures. They were also rhetorical devices, which were designed to bolster the cult’s legitimacy, attract pilgrims, and reaffirm the boundaries of orthodoxy. Moreover, dream-healings, often linked to themes of conversion, penitence, or doctrinal instruction, served both as therapy and as pedagogy. The miracle collections thus reveal as much about the social imagination of Byzantine Christianity—its anxieties, aspirations, and negotiations with inherited traditions—as they do about specific healing events.
Csepregi’s volume will be indispensable for scholars of Byzantine religion, late antique narrative, and the cultural history of healing. In addition to addressing a significant gap in the literature, it offers an analytical framework for investigating how religious traditions adopt, modify, and endorse inherited ritual technologies. What results is a thoroughly documented and nuanced account of interpretation that will be a fundamental source of information for further study.