112 Chapter 3 3.1 Introduction In the previous chapters we have seen that monastic (im)mobility could be variously interpreted, but was not considered to be neutral. People had normative ideas about it and these ideas found their way into prescriptive texts and hagiography. The present chapter will focus on the ways in which hagiographers interpreted and represented monastic mobility. Specifically, it will analyse representations of travel motivation. Considering the charged and multivalent nature of monastic mobility, one would expect that hagiographers included the motivations for the mobility of monks in their narratives. This would give the authors the opportunity to interpret the journeys in a positive light for their audiences. Moreover, the highly mobile character of Gregory, Euthymius and Elias is exceptional in the middle-Byzantine hagiographical corpus, so the authors might have felt the need to provide explanations for the many journeys to account for this relative anomaly in the contemporary output of the genre.345 To a certain degree, the saints’ Lives meet this expectation. That the hagiographers represented travel motivations in particular cases was already observed in the previous chapter, in which examples were discussed where hesychia inspired mobility in the Lives of Gregory and Euthymius. Travel in search of hesychia is, however, not the only travel motivation represented in the narratives.346 Studying how motivations for travel, more broadly, are represented in the saints’ Lives thus presents us with an opportunity to ask how the hagiographers interpreted all journeys of the monks whose life they narrated, and whether the representation of all of these travel motivations will enlighten us further on value judgements on monastic mobility. Representation in hagiography is the result of a complex interplay of factors. To a certain degree, authors wished to ‘document’ the events they describe, the form of the narrative is bound by genre conventions and topoi, and authors also had various persuasive aims.347 Studying the representation of travel motivations in the narratives therefore also presents us with the opportunity to ask whether the hagiographers used the travel theme as a discursive strategy. In other words, investigating how authors represent the travel motivation of monks might show us how hagiographers wished to use – or not use – ‘the traveller-identity’ of these highly mobile saints to portray a certain image of these monks. The following analysis will thus answer two consecutive questions. Firstly, how did hagiographers interpret monastic mobility for their audiences and (for which aims) did they 345 In addition, representing travel motivations might be attractive for authors due to the narrative potential for organising the plot by providing insight into the motives of the saint. 346 In the Life of Elias hesychia was not a motivation for mobility (see chapter 2, section 2.4 and appendix 2), but we find many other motivations (including two journeys in search of solitude, so comparable to hesychia, see chapter 3, section 3.5 and appendix 8). 347 See the Introduction, pp. 26-28 for a discussion on the aims of hagiography.
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