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Christian Novels from the Menologion of Symeon Metaphrastes
Symeon Metaphrastes
Harvard University Press, 2017

Created in the tenth century, most likely as an imperial commission, the Menologion is a collection of rewritings of saints’ lives originally intended to be read at services for Christian feast days. Yet Symeon Metaphrastes’s stories also abound in transgression and violence, punishment and redemption, love and miracles. They resemble Greek novels of the first centuries of the Common Era, highlighting intense emotions and focusing on desire, both sacred and profane.

Symeon Metaphrastes was celebrated for rescuing martyrdom accounts and saints’ biographies that otherwise may have been lost. His Menologion, among the most important Byzantine works, represents the culmination of a well-established tradition of Greek Christian storytelling. A landmark of Byzantine religious and literary culture, the Menologion was revered for centuries—copied in hundreds of manuscripts, recited publicly, and adapted into other medieval languages. This edition presents the first English translation of six Christian novels excerpted from Symeon’s text, all of them featuring women who defy social expectations.

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Early Medieval Hagiography
James T. Palmer
Arc Humanities Press, 2018
Saints were powerful role models in the early Middle Ages, capable of defining communities. But what roles did saintly biographies play in shaping the medieval West? Can we understand society and its many post-Roman transformations through them? This short book takes readers from the creation of medieval hagiography, through the ways in which it circulated, to a wide-ranging assessment of different modern methodologies used to interrogate hagiographies, from early twentieth-century source criticism, to the insights gained from gender studies, postmodernism and digital humanities.
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Imagining the Sacred Past
Hagiography and Power in Early Normandy
Samantha Kahn Herrick
Harvard University Press, 2007

In 911, the French king ceded land along the river Seine to Rollo the Viking, on condition that he convert to Christianity. Over the next century and a half, Rollo and his descendants would become powerful and pious Christian rulers of the mighty European territory, Normandy. In 1066, Rollo's descendant William would conquer England, with papal sanction.

Investigating the role of religious tradition in the legitimation of power and the establishment of identity, Samantha Kahn Herrick illuminates the often murky early history of the duchy of Normandy. Central to this religious heritage stood the region's traditional saints, whose deeds, recorded in Latin lives, were celebrated regularly. Herrick focuses on the neglected figures Taurinus of Evreux, Vigor of Bayeux, and Nicasius of Rouen, saints with particular resonance in areas central to the Norman dukes' territorial ambitions. In elaborating a vision of the past that helped explain the present, the saints' stories sanctioned the dukes' rule.

Innovative in its historical use of hagiographical literature, this work advances our understanding of early Normandy and the Vikings' transformation from pagan raiders to Christian princes. It also sheds light on the intersection of religious tradition, identity, and power.

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The Life of Saint Neilos of Rossano
Raymond L. Capra
Harvard University Press, 2018
The Life of Saint Neilos of Rossano is a masterpiece of historically accurate Italo-Greek monastic literature. Neilos, who died in 1004, vividly exemplifies the preoccupations of Greek monks in southern Italy under the Byzantine Empire. A restless search for a permanent residence, ascetic mortification of the body, and pursuit by enemies are among the concerns this text shares with biographies of other saints from the region. Like many of his peers, Neilos lived in both hermitages and monasteries, torn between the competing conventions of solitude and community. The Life of Neilos offers a snapshot of a distinctive time when Greek and Latin monasticism coexisted, a world that vanished after the schism between the churches of Rome and Constantinople in 1054. This is the first English translation, with a newly revised Greek text.
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Sainted Women of the Dark Ages
Jo Ann McNamara, John E. Halborg, and Gordon Whatley, eds.
Duke University Press, 1992
Sainted Women of the Dark Ages makes available the lives of eighteen Frankish women of the sixth and seventh centuries, all of whom became saints. Written in Latin by contemporaries or near contemporaries, and most translated here for the first time, these biographies cover the period from the fall of the Roman Empire and the conversion of the invading Franks to the rise of Charlemagne's family.
Three of these holy women were queens who turned to religion only after a period of intense worldly activity. Others were members of the Carolingian family, deeply implicated in the political ambitions of their male relatives. Some were partners in the great Irish missions to the pagan countryside and others worked for the physical salvation of the poor. From the peril and suffering of their lives they shaped themselves as paragons of power and achievement. Beloved by their sisters and communities for their spiritual gifts, they ultimately brought forth a new model of sanctity.
These biographies are unusually authentic. At least two were written by women who knew their subjects, while others reflect the direct testimony of sisters within the cloister walls. Each biography is accompanied by an introduction and notes that clarify its historical context. This volume will be an excellent source for students and scholars of women's studies and early medieval social, religious, and political history.
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Saints of Ninth- and Tenth-Century Greece
Anthony Kaldellis
Harvard University Press, 2019

Saints of Ninth- and Tenth-Century Greece collects funeral orations, encomia, and narrative hagiography. Together, these works illuminate one of the most obscure periods of Greek history—when holy men played central roles as the Byzantine administration reimposed control on southern and central Greece in the wake of Avar, Slavic, and Arab attacks and the collapse of the late Roman Empire. The bishops of the region provided much-needed leadership and institutional stability, while ascetics established hermitages and faced invaders. The Lives gathered here include accounts of Peter of Argos, which offers insight into episcopal authority in medieval Greece, and Theodore of Kythera, an important source for the history of piracy in the Aegean Sea.

This volume, which illustrates the literary variety of saints’ Lives, presents Byzantine Greek texts written by locals in the provinces and translated here into English for the first time.

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Tradition And Belief
Religious Writing in Late Anglo-Saxon England
Clara A. Lees
University of Minnesota Press, 1999

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Violence and Miracle in the Fourteenth Century
Private Grief and Public Salvation
Michael E. Goodich
University of Chicago Press, 1995
As war, pestilence, and famine spread through Europe in the Middle Ages, so did reports of miracles, of hopeless victims wondrously saved from disaster. These "rescue miracles," recorded by over one hundred fourteenth-century cults, are the basis of Michael Goodich's account of the miraculous in everyday medieval life.

Rescue miracles offer a wide range of voices rarely heard in medieval history, from women and children to peasants and urban artisans. They tell of salvation not just from the ravages of nature and war, but from the vagaries of a violent society—crime, unfair judicial practices, domestic squabbles, and communal or factional conflict. The stories speak to a collapse of confidence in decaying institutions, from the law to the market to feudal authority. Particularly, the miraculous escapes documented during the Hundred Years' War, the Italian communal wars, and other conflicts are vivid testimony to the end of aristocratic warfare and the growing victimization of noncombatants.

Miracles, Goodich finds, represent the transcendent and unifying force of faith in a time of widespread distress and the hopeless conditions endured by the common people of the Middle Ages. Just as the lives of the saints, once dismissed as church propaganda, have become valuable to historians, so have rescue miracles, as evidence of an underlying medieval mentalite. This work expands our knowledge of that state of mind and the grim conditions that colored and shaped it.
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