Space in Edifying Stories: The Case of Anastasios Sinaites
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
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| Description | The edifying story, a minor but prolific hagiographic genre, is one of the most concise Byzantine narrative forms. Given its brevity, there is usually not much room left for descriptions of the scenery and places in the stories. Still, the construction and perception of space often play a more important role in this genre than in saints’ lives, because edifying stories, similarly as novels and unlike saints’ lives, focus on a relatively limited time span, but often extend the narration in space. This chapter examines the notion and the function of space in these narratives, while taking the first collection by Anastasios Sinaites as a case study. It analyses the texts with the help of the tools of narrative theory, focusing especially on three concepts relevant for the cultural reality of edifying story: the dichotomy between the profane and the sacred space, the liminal character of the space and the ‘heterotopia’. It presents the use and combination of various spatial topoi of monastic literature in Anastasios’ first collection, and it claims that the narrative space in this collection also has an organizing function. |