The Cult of Saints project in association with the Centre d’Histoire et Civilisation de Byzance in Paris is co-organising a workshop entitled:

Culte des saints et littérature hagiographique : accords et désaccords

Studies on hagiographical dossiers usually emphasise the interdependence between cultic practice and literary production, seeing them as mutually reinforcing each other. However some cults and some hagiographies – not numerous but highly interesting – do not follow this general rule, and display a disjunction between cultic practices and literary production. This workshop aims at studying such cases. On the one hand, we will consider texts, such as the Lives of Mary of Egypt and Simeon the Holy Fool, which initially did not give rise to cult. Under this category we will also discuss ‘strange sanctity’ or sonderbare Heilige (as H. Usener termed it), the paradoxical sanctity which seems to defy not only theology, but even common sense, and yet was extremely successful in creating literary heroes. On the other hand, we will examine well-established cults in which hagiography appeared relatively late, and even then was often borrowed from the dossier of other saints of a similar kind (as in the case of warrior saints). We hope that examining the links, and disjunctions, between the dynamics of cult and the dynamics of hagiographical production will help to identify the mechanism which drove both the former and the latter.

Participants:

Nikolos Aleksidze (Cult of Saints, Oxford University)

Anne-Catherine Baudoin (Paris, École Normale Supérieure)

Phil Booth (Oxford University)

Pascal Boulhol (University of Aix-Marseille)

Ildiko Csepregi (Central European University)

Koen De Temmerman (University of Gent)

Vincent Déroche (Centre d’Histoire et Civilisation de Byzance)

Marina Detoraki (University of Crete)

Bernard Flusin (École Pratique des Hautes Études /Paris IV-Sorbonne)

Damien Labadie (École Pratique des Hautes Études)

Flavia Ruani (University of Gent)

Arietta Papaconstantinou (Cult of Saints, University of Reading)

Bryan Ward-Perkins (Cult of Saints, University of Oxford)

Michael Williams (University of Maynooth)

Robert Wiśniewski (Cult of Saints, University of Warsaw)

Venue: Centre d’Histoire et Civilisation de Byzance, rue Cardinal Lemoine 52, Paris.

25 – 26 September 2015.