Publication, "Byzantine and Medieval History as Represented in Hagiography"

CML's Christian Høgel has co-edited the new book on "Byzantine and Medieval History as Represented in Hagiography" with Anna Lampadaridi and Vincent Déroche. The book is open access and available here. The volume also contains a contribution by former CML PhD Steffen Hope. 

This edited volume explores the amount or type of secular history that a reader of Byzantine hagiography – or a frequent church-goer – could have received. As a genre related to historiography, hagiography would offer much information on pagan times (in times of persecution of Christians), on rulers and states (where saints lived), and on specific places and (purportedly) historical figures. Hagiography could in a sense be seen as the most accessible type of historiography to a wide public, and it is through this – and other common media as coins and monuments – that we may get an idea about common notions about secular history, also when this was to our notions invented or thoroughly reshaped through rewriting.The volume contains readings of hagiographical texts and hagiographical collections, divided into four parts dealing with: local identity, rewriting of religious controversies (primarily Iconoclasm), reinventing figures from the past, and the case of the Byzantine synaxarion.