Anna Lampadaridi, Vincent Déroche, and Christian Høgel, eds. L'histoire comme elle se présentait dans l'hagiographie byzantine et médiévale / Byzantine and Medieval History as Represented in Hagiography. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Studia Byzantina Upsaliensia, 21. Uppsala Universitet, 2022. [Open Access]

From Uppsala Universitet

This edited volume explores the amount or type of secular history that a reader of Byzantine hagiography – or a frequent church-goer – could have received. As a genre related to historiography, hagiography would offer much information on pagan times (in times of persecution of Christians), on rulers and states (where saints lived), and on specific places and (purportedly) historical figures. Hagiography could in a sense be seen as the most accessible type of historiography to a wide public, and it is through this – and other common media as coins and monuments – that we may get an idea about common notions about secular history, also when this was to our notions invented or thoroughly reshaped through rewriting.The volume contains readings of hagiographical texts and hagiographical collections, divided into four parts dealing with: local identity, rewriting of religious controversies (primarily Iconoclasm), reinventing figures from the past, and the case of the Byzantine synaxarion.