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This book examines the effects of Christianization upon regional identity and political thought in the eastern Mediterranean in the fifth and sixth centuries. Itfocuses on the centrifugal effects of foundation myths, especially within the Syriac‐speaking world. These myths produced a sense of cultural independence, peculiar to Syria and Mesopotamia, and this in turn provided the basis for a more radical challenge to the Roman emperor, during the turbulent Christological controversies of the sixth century. The book begins by examining how bishops and emperors could use Christianity to manage and control local religious behaviour, before turning to the rich evidence from the city of Edessa, and its Syriac legends of early kings and missionaries, to investigate how the connection between religion and cultural independence worked within the Christian Roman empire. At a time when Jews in the Roman world were increasingly differentiated by religion and custom, this book investigates how far Edessenes and other Syriac‐speakers were consciously members of a distinctive group. The argument continues by discussing the transformation of this cultural legacy in the sixth century, when the hagiographies of bishops such as John of Ephesus began to invoke local belief and culture in Mesopotamia as an ancient orthodoxy, that made Edessa or Mesopotamia a chosen land, preserving true belief at a time when the rest of the empire had gone astray. For these authors, the emperor's ruler was conditional on his obedience to Christ, the true ruler of all.

The unusually high regard with which Saint Francis of Assisi is held has served to insulate him from any real criticism of the kind of sanctity that he embodied: a sanctity based, first and foremost, on his deliberate pursuit of poverty. This book offers a critique of Francis's “holy poverty” by considering its ironic relationship to the ordinary poverty of the poor. While Francis's emphasis on voluntary poverty as the first step toward spiritual regeneration may have opened the door to salvation for wealthy Christians like himself, it effectively precluded the idea that the poor could use their own involuntary poverty as a path to heaven. In marked contrast to Francis's poverty, theirs was more likely to be seen by contemporaries as a symptom of moral turpitude. Moreover, Francis's experiment in poverty had a potentially negative effect on the level of almsgiving directed toward the involuntary poor. Not only did the Franciscan abhorrence of money prevent the friars from assuming any significant role in alleviating urban poverty but their own mendicant lifestyle also put them in direct competition with the other kind of beggars for the charitable donations of the urban elite. Though this work focuses on the idea of “holy poverty” as it appears in the earliest hagiographical accounts of the saint as well as Francis's own writings, its implications for the relationship between poverty as a spiritual discipline and poverty as a socioeconomic affliction extend to Christianity as a whole.

This book examines the cult of the martyrs in the writings of the Cappadocian Fathers: Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus. Chapter 1 analyzes the complex rituals of the panegyris, the martyr festival, as a transformative event by which the faithful experience the martyr’s holiness. How they employ the martyrs in preaching, in organizational protocols, in Scriptural exegesis, and in their call to Christian morality all show their own profound devotion to martyr piety and their evangelical zeal in promoting the cult of the martyrs. Chapter 2 examines the Cappadocians’ deployment of rhetorical description, ekphrasis, to advance the cult of the martyrs ritually, spiritually, and materially. Gregory of Nyssa’s ekphrasis for St. Theodore incited the faithful to participate in ritual transformation. Such materiality is brought to bear in Nyssen’s other ekphrasis describing difficulties in building a martyrium. The chapter compares Nyssen’s martyrium to the extant ruins of the martyrium of St. Philip in Hierapolis, giving an imaginative glimpse at the spectacular structures the Cappadocians funded. Chapter 3 introduces the Cappadocians and their families through a discussion of the ways kinship occurred in fourth-century Cappadocia: marriage and birth, monasticism, and martyr piety. Kinship obligations provided the means for the Cappadocians to successfully claim certain martyrs as their ancestral kin and to turn some of their family members into martyrs within a few years of their deaths. Chapter 4 deals with the Cappadocians’ utilization, manipulation, and preaching about both genders in their martyr panegyrics that contrasts sharply with their articulation of gender in their family panegyrics.

This book examines the literary representation of madness in a series of medieval French texts, including both romance and hagiography. The study covers both ‘genuine’ madmen and ‘holy fools’, for whom madness is actually a veil for penance or sanctity. Madness afflicts the greatest heroes of the Arthurian world — Lancelot and Tristan — as well as numerous other chivalric figures. Overall, medieval French texts depict a wide range of attitudes towards madness: it may reflect nobility and refinement, heroic or spiritual transcendence, tragic impairment, comic ineptitude, or sinful degradation. The examination of these texts allows for the study of how and why madness is used as a literary motif; how the concept of madness interacts with other categories of difference, such as class and gender, in producing or problematising personal identity; and how different treatments of madness may be associated with different literary genres. The motif of madness is also compared to forms of bodily deviance, such as lycanthropy and somnambulism, in an analysis of the ways that identity is crafted in medieval texts through the joint crafting of mind and body. Texts examined include the Prose Lancelot, the Prose Tristan, Amadas et Ydoine, Robert le Diable, the Miracles de St. Louis, and assorted other devotional and courtly texts.

In the early 16th c., Bengali brahmin Kṛṣṇa Caitanya (1476–1533) inspired a community of Kṛṣṇa worshipers in Bengal, Orissa, and Vraja. This study examines the ways those devotees came to be unified through the intervention of a Sanskrit and Bengali hagiography, the Caitanya caritāmṛta of Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja. Devotees thought Caitanya to be god, Kṛṣṇa, and eventually saw in him an unusual form of divine androgyny, Kṛṣṇa fused with his consort Rādhā. His many Sanskrit and Bengali hagiographies depict scattered independent groups, each proposing a different theology and practice. Kṛṣṇadāsa’s hagiography sought to synthesize these disparate positions into a unified tradition by deploying a sophisticated rhetoric that would hierarchize theology, standardize ritual, and fix literary canon. This is a study of how Kṛṣṇadāsa, in the absence of any institutional authority, synthesized a uniquely Bengali Vaiṣṇava tradition. In the early 17th c., three devotees, led by brahmin Śrīnivāsa, carried the Caitanya caritāmṛta back to Bengal from Vraja. Within a decade of losing and then recovering the text, this trio placed copies in the hands of every Vaiṣṇava in Bengal and Orissa. The literary practices surrounding the circulation established the text as the final word by fixing a grammar of tradition, by which communities could continually replicate the original experience of Caitanya’s presence, by interpreting their own as a fractal history. So persuasive was this single document that today it has assumed iconic status, even taking its place on the altar alongside images of Kṛṣṇa and Caitanya.

Reforming Saints explains how and why Renaissance humanists composed Latin hagiography in Germany in the decades leading up to the Reformation. Reforming Saints shows that, contrary to scholarly presumptions, there was a resurgence in the composition of saints’ lives in the half centuries on either side of 1500 and that German humanists were among the most active authors and editors of these texts. A goal of Reforming Saints is therefore to shed light on the intersection of a kind of writer (the humanist) and a kind of literature (hagiography) at a defining moment for both. Reforming Saints argues for evaluating this abundant, if overlooked and misunderstood literature on its own terms and against an approach that would denigrate it for not meeting standards drawn from Erasmus or Luther. By exploring salient themes in the humanists’ hagiographical writings and relating them to the general religious culture of the era, Reforming Saints discovers the unexpected yet coherent extent of humanist engagement in the cult of the saints and exposes the strategic ways that these authors made writings about the saints into a literature for religious and cultural reforms that German humanists promoted through much else of their activity. Writing saints’ lives provided these Renaissance scholars a way to investigate Germany's medieval past, to reconstruct and exalt its greatness, and to advocate programs of religious and cultural reform. Reforming Saints proposes that these German humanists thus showed themselves to be much like their Italian contemporaries, many of whom were engaged in similar projects. Moreover, these compositions provided later authors, polemicists, and philologists in Catholic Europe – from Counter‐Reformation preachers in Switzerland to seventeenth‐century Bollandists in Brussels – a legacy to draw from and use for different purposes by the end of the sixteenth century.

This is the first comprehensive interdisciplinary study of the cult of St Margaret of Antioch in medieval England. Margaret was one of the most famous female saints of both the Catholic world and of Eastern Christianity (as St Marina). Her legend is remembered by her confrontation with a dragon-shaped devil, who allegedly swallowed Margaret and then burst asunder. This episode became firmly established in iconography, making her one of the most frequently represented saints. Margaret was supposedly martyred in the late third century, but apart from the historically problematic legend there is no evidence concerning her in other contemporary sources. The sudden appearance of her name in liturgical manuscripts in the late eighth century is connected with the coeval dispersal of her relics. The cult grew in England from Anglo-Saxon times, with over 200 churches dedicated to Margaret (second only to Mary among female saints), with hundreds of her images and copies of her life known within the country. This monograph examines Greek, Latin, Old English, Middle English, and Anglo-Norman versions of Margaret’s life, their mouvance and cultural context, providing editions of the hitherto unpublished texts. In considering these versions, the iconographic evidence, their patronage, and audience, the monograph traces the changes in St Margaret’s story through the eight centuries before the Reformation. It also considers the further trajectory of the legend as reflected in popular fairy tales and contemporary cultural stereotypes. Special attention is given to the interpretation of St Margaret’s demonic encounter, central to the legend’s iconography and theology.