Understanding Hagiography and its Textual Tradition: the Late Antique and the Early Medieval Period (6th-11th centuries), University of Lisbon, October 24–26, 2018

Between the sixth and the eleventh centuries, passions, lives of saints, translations of relics, miracles and other hagiographical genres underwent a remarkable process of transmission and rewriting. This conference aims at producing a fresh look at the transmission and the evolution of these crucial pieces of the spiritual and cultural life in the early Middle Ages. It will explore manuscript and textual traditions and literary reshaping, both in the history of the hagiographic genre and in the evolutionary process of the specific texts, without overlooking their function as pieces of a cult or simply of edification.

Papers should focus on hagiographic texts (passions, lives of saints, translations of relics, miracles and other hagiographic pieces) produced between the sixth and the eleventh centuries, as well as on hagiographic books (passionaries, legendaries and other sorts of compilation) composed before the late eleventh century. Papers must present original results arising out of a current research.

Main thematic lines

• Transformation of the hagiographic text, both at the linguistic and at the literary level, generating new versions (by abbreviation, amplification or otherwise).
• Textual history and manuscript tradition.
• Creation, evolution and transmission of passionaries, legendaries and other sorts of compilation.