Cult Transfer and Literary Transformation in Hagiographic Legends during the First Millennium, Maison Française, Oxford, February 15, 2019
Religious cults can be affected, transformed, or even obliterated by their transfer from region to region. The cults of saints and their related customs, legends, images, and relics, could travel away from their place of origin, following waves of migrations or networks of ecclesiastical, political, social, and commercial contacts. Transfer could transform a cult, or affect indigenous cults through their contact with imported ones. This workshop will examine the paradigm of cult transfer as a historical tool for our understanding of literary transformation in Byzantine Greek hagiography and its related linguistic traditions, in all its different manifestations.