Агиография раннепалеологовской эпохи: «старые» и «новые» святые в тени Симеона Метафраста

Античная древность и средние века. 2022. Т. 50. С. 283–311.

Lukhovitskiy L.

The paper focuses on the hagiographical rewriting of the Palaeologan period. After outlining the corpus of relevant texts, I discuss the two paradigms that currently permeate Byzantine studies, the “old saints” paradigm and the “metaphrasis” paradigm. Both approaches, despite their indisputable heuristic value, do not take into consideration all aspects of hagiographical rewriting of the period. The first paradigm is not adequate because, firstly, it is virtually impossible to determine how great the chronological distance between the hero and the text must be to make him or her “old”, and, secondly, because a Life of an old saint does not amount to a rewriting; vice versa, a rewritten text does not necessarily mean that we are dealing with a Life of an old saint. Regarding the second trend, the term “metaphrasis” inevitably creates an association with the metaphrastic Menologion, which is not entirely justifiable because the Palaeologan hagiographic corpus differs from it minimum in four important ways: these texts are often transmitted in authorial collections (instead of menologia); they were composed on occasion (instead of being part of a prearranged program); they have individual (instead of collective) authorship; the rewriting techniques allow for major alterations in the contents and are rarely limited to passage-for-passage transposition.

Keywords: Византия, агиография, Byzantine studies, Byzantine hagiography, Палеологи, Symeon Metaphrastes, Симеон Метафраст, metaphrasis, метафразирование, Palaeologan Byzantium