The seven articles in this volume originated at a 2016 conference at Ghent University on literary constructions of heroism in late antique and early medieval hagiography. The editors’ introduction sets up the two-pronged ambition of the book: to consider generally how hagiographers made use of literary and rhetorical traditions when writing saints’ lives; and to examine more specifically the narrative techniques that they employed to depict saints as heroes and heroines. The contributions divide neatly between Latin and Greek hagiographical traditions dating between the fourth and eighth centuries with a focus on martyr acts and vitae, which feature heroic protagonists, rather than miracula or translatio narratives, who generally do not. Some of the authors are more successful at fulfilling the editors’ mandate than others. Noteworthy are Stephanos Efthymiades, who highlights the role of “secondary heroes” in Greek saints’ lives – antagonists (villains), protagonists (family members), and even the hagiographer himself as a living witness to his subject's holiness; Anne Alwis, who examines the rewritings of the lives of the Byzantine saints Tatiana and Ia as skilled orators capable of “persuading their audience to their reviser's beliefs” (96); and Christian Høgel, who shows how the epithet anargyroi (“moneyless”) was applied to doctor saints like Kosmas and Damian to avoid the apparent conflict between their cures, which derived from God, and their medical profession, which demanded money for service. Unfortunate lacunae in Anglophone and Francophone scholarship mar several of the essays. The editors’ introduction makes no mention of Felice Lifshitz's classical article “Beyond Positivism and Genre” (1994) on the definition of hagiography. Piet Gerbrandy's speculative piece on Notker the Stammerer's strange Metrum de vita sancti Galli would have benefitted from familiarity with Anna Taylor's ground-breaking book Epic Lives and Monasticism in the Central Middle Ages, 800–1200 (2013). Although several contributions deal with the rewriting of saints’ lives, none mention the important scholarship on réécriture by Monique Goullet, Martin Heinzelmann, and others. Even so, the editors deserve praise for their vision to bring together studies of hagiographical texts from the Latin and Greek traditions.
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