'The Shape of Water': Rewriting Virgin Martyrs in Byzantium, lecture by Anne Alwis (University of Kent), King’s College London, February 9, 2016, 5:30–7:00 pm

According to their saintly biographies, Tatiana of Rome and Ia of Persia were martyred in the third and fourth centuries C.E. Their cults were not immensely popular but roughly a thousand years after their alleged deaths, the stories of these virgin martyrs were chosen to be either re-written and/or copied in thirteenth-fourteenth-century Byzantium. The paper will examine the process of rewriting to examine why stories are retold; why hagiography is such a fluid and flexible 'genre'; and what that might imply for the transmission of sacred knowledge and authority in Byzantium.

Anne Alwis obtained her PhD from King’s College London, and then spent a postdoctoral year at the British School at Rome. She subsequently taught at King’s College London, Birkbeck and Royal Holloway before taking up her post at Kent. In 2007, she was a Stanley Seeger Fellow at Princeton University. Her research focuses on all aspects of hagiography, the transmission and translation of Greek and Latin texts, and their social, literary and cultural contexts. Her monograph Celibate Marriages in Late Antiquity and Byzantium: The Lives of SS. Julian & Basilissa, Andronikos & Athanasia and Galaktion & Episteme was published in 2011.