Narrating Power and Authority in Late Antique and Medieval Hagiography from East to West, Academia Belgica, Rome, February 15–17, 2018

In hagiography, saints often confront a number of obstacles and it is their conduct in faith that marks them as saints; women and men who stand apart and are presented as exemplars to be modeled. Often, and this is especially the case of martyr acts, the obstacles are of a religio-political nature and the focus of the saint’s conduct is her/his defiance. However, there are instances, especially within the medieval Sufi context, where the relationships between saints and rulers are more nuanced, depicting a symbiotic relationship, where both parties draw upon the authority of the other. There are also those cases in which authority belongs neither to the saint or the king but to ordinary people from across the socio-political and religious spectrum. In recent years, there has been interest in exploring these relationships as depicted in histories, hagiography, and martyr acts and recent studies have shed light on the concept of sainthood, doctrine, and more generally, the history of various societies. However, the literary aspects of these narratives remain underexplored despite the wealth of information such analyses offer on the socio-cultural and political thought world of various courts and societies across the Indo-Mediterranean world.

This conference takes a diachronic and cross-cultural approach to the study of power and authority from above (courts/saints) and below (saints/ordinary people). We invite papers from scholars who work on different types of late antique and medieval hagiographical narratives (Lives, Martyr Acts, hagiographical romances) working on Persian, Arabic, Syriac, Georgian, Coptic, Armenian, Greek, and Latin hagiographical texts. Of particular interest are papers that will explore:

• how texts construct and understand the roles of saints and rulers vis-à-vis one another (positive, negative, symbiotic/exploitative)
• how authority is negotiated between saints and the populace
• the power of the life of the saint after death (relics, the authority of hagiographers)
• the role of characterization in the portrayal of figures of power and authority (stock characters, intermediaries, secondary figures)
• audience milieu and reader reception
• literary history