First International Conference on Early Christian Literature, Late Antique and Byzantine Hagiography, University of Valencia, July 1–3, 2020

The similarities between Early Christian literature and Late Antique and Byzantine Hagiography are very clear, since both use identical literary models and motifs in their narrations and are created in a similar ideological and geographical framework.   

This connection between the literature from the Early Christian Era (2nd-4th centuries) and Late Antique and Byzantine Hagiography (5th to 15th centuries) are much more significant, if two literary genres such as the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles and the Saints’ Lives are studied and perceived as a whole. Thus, in the former one can observe a wide range of literary motifs that will be developed later by Late Antique or Byzantine hagiographers, especially in the Saints’ Lives. In fact, from a global perspective the Early Christian literature dealing with the apostles and their missions could be interpreted as a sort of protohagiography, a clear antecedent of the narrations found later in Hagiography in Late Antiquity or the Byzantine Era.

For these reasons, this conference is aimed at analyzing this literary phenomenon from a multidisciplinary point of view. The sessions of the conference will be focused on the study of the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostle –not only the so called “Major”, but also other texts related to this tradition, i.e. the Acts of Philip or the Acts of Xanthippe and Polixena– and the Eastern saints’ lives composed from the 5th century onwards. Among the papers on these topics, discussion on other tradition different than the Greek one, such as the Arabic, Syriac, Ethiopic, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, Slavonic or Latin, will be very welcome.

Some of the main thematic axes will be:

• Literary connections between the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles and the Saints’ Lives.
• Literary motifs of the hagiographical tradition.
• The role of women in the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles and/or in Hagiography.
• The translations of the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles in Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages.

Any proposal related either to these axes or to the main topic of this conference will be reviewed by the scientific committee. Communications could be focused on a single work, author or genre or present a multidisciplinary or comparative approach, by studying, i.e., the presence of a precise motif on different genres, literatures, centuries.