Dr Anne Alwis from the Department of Classical & Archaeological Studies is to give two talks on hagiography in February. The first, entitled ‘”The Shape of Water”: Rewriting Virgin Martyrs in Byzantium’ is at King’s College London on Tuesday 9 February 2016.
According to their saintly biographies, Tatiana of Rome and Ia of Persia were martyred in the third and fourth centuries C.E. Their cults were not immensely popular but roughly a thousand years after their alleged deaths, the stories of these virgin martyrs were chosen to be either re-written and/or copied in 13th/14th-century Byzantium. The paper will examine the process of rewriting to examine why stories are retold; why hagiography is such a fluid and flexible ‘genre’; and what that might imply for the transmission of sacred knowledge and authority in Byzantium.
Anne will also present a paper on ‘Rhetorical Heroines: Rewriting Virgin Martyrs’ at an international conference hosted by the European Research Council research group Novel Saints at the University of Ghent, Belgium from 18-20 February 2016.
The conference entitled ‘Holy Hero(in)es: Literary Constructions of Heroism in Late Antique and Early Medieval Hagiography’ aims to explore definitions of and aspects/concepts relevant to heroism in Christian narrative. What does it mean to be a hero(ine) in these narratives? Are there different types of hero(in)es (and of heroism)? To what extent can narratological concepts provide useful tools for evaluating hagiographical constructions of heroism? The other central question is how saints (and/or, possibly, other characters) are characterised, shaped, imagined and/or constructed as hero(in)es.
Further details of the conference are available at: www.letterkunde.ugent.be/calendar/1073