Hagiography in Late Byzantium (1204–1453)

The final period of the Byzantine empire witnessed an efflorescence in the writing of saints’ lives. From the last 250 years of Byzantium we know by name at least 60 practitioners of the hagiographic genre (not counting the anonymous authors), ranging from statesmen to patriarchs to simple monks. Despite the fact that most of their compositions have been edited, some more than a century ago, they have received relatively little attention from modern scholars, ¹ and only three vitae of late Byzantine saints [Theodora of Arta (BHG 1736), Gregory Palamas (BHG 718) and Romylos of Vidin (BHG 2383)] have ever been translated into a western European language. ² There are several reasons for this comparative neglect of Palaiologan hagiography: some of the vitae are in rare editions, difficult to access; they tend to be quite lengthy, and the language of some is very high style and difficult to comprehend; finally, the Palaiologan era, viewed as a period of decline, has generally received less scholarly attention than earlier centuries. As will be seen, however, the surviving corpus of hagiographical texts well deserves study both as a source of historical data and as a literary phenomenon. ³