Saints and Monks on the Move: The Case of Edifying Stories
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| Year of publication | 2019 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | In Byzantine edifying stories (4th to 10th centuries), travel and journey acquire various forms and play various roles within the narrative. First, we encounter the metadiegetic role of travelling in the early collections of stories composed as travelogues. This function is explicit in the History of the Monks in Egypt and John Moschus’ Spiritual Meadow and less explicit in Palladius’ Lausiakon. Second, we can identify the journey as a motif in the stories themselves, probably most prominently in the so-called ‘Daniel-Sketiotes-Dossier’ with its tension between the world of the desert and the secular world. Finally, we can also detect the “transcendent” mode of travelling, which includes the supernatural moves of people from one place to another. Such instances occur in all the collections, and most significantly in Anastasios Sinaites’ stories. The aim of this contribution will be, therefore, to explore the diegetic and metadiegetic functions of all the above-mentioned types of moving from one place to another, and to demonstrate different approaches to these motifs by different authors. |
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