The volume under consideration had its origins in a series of sessions organized for the 2020 International Medieval Congress in Leeds that was moved online due to the Coronavirus pandemic. That move to a virtual conference necessitated the organizers scaling back their original plans for the session. Regrouping from that setback, the volume’s editors assembled “a still greater number of experts” (9) to contribute to a modified proceedings now published as the third volume in Brepols’ series Fabulae: Narrative in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. As the editors state in their introduction, the volume’s central goal is to approach “holiness and sainthood” in Late Antiquity “from their historical and conceptual margins, and not through their central features of figures” (10) in order to explore how “ideas of holiness and sanctity may acquire new meaning when they are approached from the perspective of boundaries” (19). To this end, the volume’s ten contributions (besides the introduction) are divided into two sections that explore two different aspects of the liminality of holiness and sainthood. The five contributions in part one, “Negotiating the Boundaries of Holiness and Sainthood,” focus on figures that did not fit into concepts of holiness and sanctity from the conceptual center and for that reason require various negotiations to fit them within the boundaries of these conceptual categories. The five essays in part two, “Spatial Boundaries of Holiness and Sanctity,” take on the concept of liminality in a more literal sense, focusing on the physical spaces where holiness and sainthood were conceptualized, and demonstrating how space was an important factor in forming concepts of holiness and sainthood (a full list of authors and titles listed is included at the end of this review).
The editors describe part one’s emphasis as “strategies employed...to adapt the images of the candidates for holiness whose qualities, occupations, and deeds required their hagiographers to undertake some kind of effort to fit them into the boundaries of sainthood” (13). Przemysław Piwowarczyk utilizes the unique archive surrounding the seventh-century Theban Miaphysite monk Ephiphanius to explore how a living holy man became a saint after death. Surviving letters to and from the saint, as well as graffiti and legal documents, demonstrate that Epiphanius was called “holy” in his lifetime, while a later life on an Egyptian bishop clearly refers to Epiphanius as a saint. Piwowarczyk further highlights that Epiphanius was a quiet recluse known for the gift of foresight and effective prayers, not for performing miracles or ascetic feats. Piwowarczyk suggests this image of a holy man may be a more accurate representation of who contemporaries viewed as sainted figures, rather than the after-the-fact portraits of most hagiographical texts. Mattia C. Chiriatti’s contribution analyzes the rhetorical strategies (especially ekphrasis) employed by Gregory of Nyssa and how these strategies help Gregory’s audience visualize the process of Saint Stephen crossing from the mortal plane to sainthood through his sufferings, though, according to Chiriatti, Stephen was just a “simple layman.” Raúl Villegas Marín’s contribution explores the evolution of the “Lucina hagiographic motif,” arguing convincingly that the literary figure of this bone gatherer transformed from a Roman matron and patron of martyr cult to an ascetic virgin and martyr herself as ideas of female sanctity transformed in the fourth- and fifth-century Latin west. Simon Loseby’s and Bryan Ward-Perkins’ joint contribution (a product of these scholars’ work on the “Cult of the Saints in Late Antiquity” online database), treats marginal cases of sanctity in the works of Gregory of Tours in which either sanctity is established by means other than Gregory’s preferred criterion (post-mortem miracles at the saint’s tomb) or cases where post-mortem miracles are explained away as caused by a factor besides the deceased’s sanctity and power. The figure of the Roman Emperor is the subject of Jonas Borsch’s essay, which argues that the Emperor Justinian reimagined the emperor’s role as mediator between divine and human spheres by transforming his own bodily infirmities (once a sign of a ruler’s divine disfavor) into an opportunity for Justinian to showcase his piety and faith in the saints. This not only led to his own healing but also to the emperor’s own body becoming “the object and instrument of divine power” (138).
Part two, though focused on the concept of space in “framing ideas of holiness and sanctity,” primarily analyzes literary texts rather than material artifacts or architecture. Nikolas Hächler and Sonsoles Costero-Quiroga’s contribution analyzes the shifting presentation of the Emperor Heraclius in the poetry of George of Pisidia, arguing that the poet assimilates the emperor to military saints, whose cult was then emergent, and that the “liminal spaces the emperor passed through on his campaign...favoured panegyrical depictions of the emperor’s progressive transformation” into a saint-like figure (149). Stephanos Efthymiadis surveys three centuries of Greek-language hagiography to demonstrate how the early rejection of city for the wilderness (as seen in Athanasius’s Life of Antony) gradually gave way to a hagiography more amenable to holy men living near (e.g., the anonymous Life of Auxentios) or even in cities (e.g., Leontios’s Life of John the Almsgiver), under the influence of urban monasticism and the increasing prominence of bishops in later antiquity. Efthymiadis further demonstrates the importance of journeys, especially moving through liminal spaces, to the plots of most Greek-language hagiographies. Fotis Vasileiou’s piece argues that John Moschus in his Spiritual Meadow “construct[s] a monastic cosmos” using “‘hard’ elements from his own world such as people, locations, and events” (206), but rearranging them to create “a literary world of harmony, beauty, and structure where his audience” could “escape from” the turmoil of the mid-seventh century (207). Anna Lampadaridi employs a sophisticated theoretical framework informed by Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, and Gérard Genette to describe how BHG 37, a Greek passion of the martyr Agatha, “transforms places into spaces” by converting certain liminal places (especially those in and around Catania) into holy sites that witness Agatha’s evolution from believer to martyr. Maurits S. De Leeuw describes how the monks Sabas and Cyril utilized Palestinian monks’ proximity to the holy places of the bible to influence contemporary religio-political disputes then raging at the imperial court in Constantinople. De Leeuw coins the useful term “Palestinian privilege” to describe the strategy of privileging the special status of the monks of Palestine in the halls of imperial power.
In a volume with many strengths, one of its greatest attributes is the organization of the essays into the two parts of the book: one focused on conceptual boundaries and another on physical ones. Such an organization allows for a coherence of concept not always found in volumes of collected essays and help the reader switch from one conceptual issue to another even while navigating a wide array of hagiographic texts and figures from various eras and places. The tightness of the organizational scheme is also highlighted in the way that the essay that concludes part one and the essay that opens part two both focus on the figure of the Roman Emperor (15). Of course, part of the reason the organization works so well is the strength of the essays themselves, which overall do an admirable job asking the reader to approach the ideas of holiness and sainthood from a new perspective by focusing on the margins, even when the essays treat well-worn texts like Gregory of Tours’ hagiographic writings or John Moschus’s Spiritual Meadow. Some of the essays have potentially wide methodological impact beyond the immediate subject. Piwowarczyk’s treatment of the mechanics whereby a “holy” person transforms into a saint, for example, could help illuminate other contexts where evidence is less plentiful than Epiphanius’s unique corpus. Similarly, Lampadaridi’s treatment of place in martyr tales and Efthymiadis’s discussion of changing relationships between holiness and the city could easily inform studies not specifically dealing with Sicily or Greek-language hagiography. Other essays provide convincing arguments that will be productive to specialists in certain fields. Scholars of the late ancient city of Rome have much to consider in Villegas Marín’s treatment of the Lucina motif. Similarly, those who study the Franks, the Justinianic Age, or Late-Roman Palestine will take note of the essays by Loseby and Ward-Perkins, Borsch, and De Leeuw respectively. It is also admirable that the volume does not skew too far towards coverage of one time period or geographic region or linguistic tradition, but includes contributions that cover the fourth to seventh centuries, that range from Western Europe to North Africa to Southwest Asia, and include material written in Greek, Latin, Coptic, and Arabic (but see below).
With all that being said, there are instances of editorial oversight that impede understanding, and aspects of some contributions that are less persuasive or less obviously related to the volume’s overall theme. All the contributions are in English, and this appears to be a deliberate tactic to widen the volume’s audience (see unnumbered note on 123). While this in and of itself is admirable, some other editorial choices seem counterproductive to this goal. In particular, the large number of passages (often large block quotes) of untranslated Greek and Coptic can impede understanding (by contrast, Latin quotations are almost always translated). Not everyone approaching this volume can be assumed to have Greek, Latin, and Coptic, so this can be an impediment to engagement with the volume. And there are further issues with the original language citations, such as block quotations of translated Greek with no original language in the footnotes (e.g., on 234) or with only part of the original Greek included in the footnotes (e.g., note 32 on 34). There are also some odd typos and imperfections in English translation that can impede meaning (for example, “to use classical Mircea Eliade’s distinction,” presumably meaning “to use Mircea Eliade’s classic distinction” [45]). There are few figures in the book, but the figures that do appear are at times difficult to decipher: for example, the map on page 154 has no key. These are editing issues, but there are also sometimes issues with the argument of the essays themselves. For example, Chiriatti’s repeated characterization of Stephen as a “simple layman” and a “new saint” (despite the fact that Stephen was the first martyr and a follower of the Apostles highlighted in the biblical book of Acts) seems to shoehorn a figure who is not “marginal” into the larger theme of the collection, though Chiriatti’s essay also makes many salient points. Sometimes problems in argumentation align with the editing issues. For example, Hächler and Costero-Quiroga argue that a bow mentioned in In Heraclium ex Africa redeuntem (ll. 27-29) may allude to Apollo, apparently on the grounds that the famous maxim “know thyself” is cited in the poem. However, the relevant passage with the maxim is only cited parenthetically and in a footnote after the authors make the initial argument, meaning that a reader would need to already be familiar with the poem to follow the line of reasoning. The argument is perhaps specious anyway, given the poet directs the “know thyself” maxim to himself and his inability to praise Heraclius (ll. 86-89). Further, immediately before mentioning the bow George refers to a horse (l. 24-26) and seems to be simply enumerating a warrior’s kit. Although issues like these impede readability and at times make the text difficult to work through, they do not tend to mar the larger arguments being made in the individual essays.
I was also troubled by what I see as a significant omission in the volume: though the work has an admirable geographic and linguistic diversity in many respects, its diversity could be amplified further by including contributions that focus on other Late Ancient languages, such as Armenian, Ge’ez, and, especially, Syriac. Not only is Syriac the third largest corpus of Late Antique texts after Greek and Latin, but it is also a corpus with rich hagiographic traditions comprising over 1,200 pieces of hagiographic literature. [1] Moreover, in a volume about crossing boundaries, it would make sense to include works from a linguistic and ecclesiastical tradition that crossed the major political boundary of Late Antiquity, the Roman-Persian border. The Church of the East, like the Armenian and Ethiopian churches, is also a major Late Antique Christian tradition outside the borders of the Roman Empire, a geographic scope which none of the essays in the volume cover (though a few deal with post-Roman territories).
Despite these few criticisms, Boundaries of Holiness, Frontiers of Sainthood succeeds admirably in its stated goal of proving that new and meaningful insights about holiness and sanctity in Late Antiquity can be gleaned by approaching the topic “from the margins.” The volume is tightly organized and features contributions that should interest scholars of the cult of saints, hagiography, or Late Antique social history more broadly.
Julia Doroszewska and Mateusz Kusio, “Introduction.”
Part I: Negotiating the Boundaries of Holiness and Sainthood
Przemysław Piwowarczyk, “The Holy Men Beyond the Limits of Humanity in Hagiography, Documentary Papyri, and Graffiti from Western Thebes.”
Mattia C. Chiriatti, “How to Portray an ἅγιος? The ἔκφρασις of Stephen within the βασιλικοὶ λόγοι of Gregory of Nyssa.”
Raúl Villegas Marín, “Beatissima Lucina, Matrona Nobilissima: Lucina and the Shifting Boundaries of Female Holiness in Late Antique Rome.”
Simon Loseby and Bryan Ward-Perkins, “Gregory of Tours and the Boundaries of Sainthood.”
Jonas Borsch, “Healing and Being Healed: Justinian, Imperial Illness, and the Emperor’s Body between Human Vulnerability and Divine Protection.”
Part II: Spatial Boundaries of Holiness and Sanctity
Nikolas Hächler and Sonsoles Costero-Quiroga, “Establishing Imperial Holiness in Liminal Spaces: Heraclius’s Transformation into the Saviour of Byzantium during Persian Campaigns Mirrored in the Panegyrical Writings of George of Pisidia.”
Stephanos Efthymiadis, “The Saint in and out of the Late Antique City: The Evidence of Greek Hagiography.”
Fotis Vasileiou, “Holy Places and Liminal Spaces in John Moschos’s Spiritual Meadow.”
Anna Lampadaridi, “Telling Spaces and Stories in a Greek Narrative of the Passion of Agatha (BHG 37).”
Maurits S. De Leeuw, “A Palestinian Holy Man at the Constantinopolitan Court: Stretching the Boundaries of Holiness at the Turn of the Sixth Century.”
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Note:
1. Jeanne-Nicole Mellon Saint-Laurent, “Syriac Hagiographic Literature,” in Daniel King, ed., The Syriac World (Routledge, 2019), 339.