113 Representations of travel motivation use the representation of travel motivations as a discursive strategy? Secondly, from this analysis, can we deduce value judgements of authors and audiences on monastic mobility? The chapter will first present a general picture of the representation of motivations for travel in the three Lives, by reflecting on motivation categories and examining which types are represented in the Lives. The analysis will then zoom in on each Life separately and discuss particular travel motivations. Because the previous chapters suggested that attitudes to travel are context-specific, at the start of the discussion of the three Lives I aimed to reconstruct what we can know about the aims of the authors and the performance and reading contexts (occasions and intended audiences).348 Finally, the analysis will allow us to draw conclusions on which choices hagiographers made when integrating the travel theme in their narratives, how hagiographers used motivations for travel as discursive strategies in different ways, and what the representation of motivations teaches us about contemporary attitudes towards monastic mobility. 3.2 Travel motivations: categorisation Travel motivation is understood here as the direct incentive for a person (or group) to move away from one place and go to another. As we will see, this incentive may not always lie with the movers themselves, but may also be caused by other people or factors. In order to establish how hagiographers represented the travel motivations of monks, we should first assess how to distinguish one motivation from another. Creating categories inevitably has drawbacks, because reality is always more complex and fluid than models can represent. Nevertheless, categorisation allows us to observe broad patterns within and between sources. Moreover, if scholars use the same general model of categorisation, rather than going immediately into the specifics of the language and categories used in their respective sources, comparisons can be more easily made on the basis of different studies. Finally, categorisation allows us to read texts against the grain. It invites us to assess whether categories that the authors themselves perhaps did not use nonetheless apply to these texts. This allows us to detect patterns that we otherwise might miss. It is therefore a worthwhile exercise to use a general mobility model as a starting point for analysis. 348 This remains partially speculative – more research into performance contexts of hagiography might provide more insights. 3
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw