19 Introduction various forms of monastic life, and this also entailed that monks could both have periods in their lives of extreme immobility and periods of mobility.34 Mobile monks are an especially interesting group to study because in current scholarship monastic mobility is often discussed in the context of why they were not supposed to travel. There would be a tension between monastic mobility and a monastic ideal of physical stability (also referred to as stabilitas loci).35 The evidence of monastic mobility in this light is either interpreted as monastic defiance of the rules, or as exceptional.36 Chapter 1 will discuss the evidence for this ideal in more detail. As we will see, ideological objections or legal limitations for monastic mobility were not as definitive nor as pervasive as sometimes has been presented in the scholarly literature. Moreover, as we will see in the rest of this thesis, there was more diversity in perceptions of mobility, also from ideological or moral perspectives. The present study focusses particularly on male monastic mobility. The reasons for focussing only on one gender are twofold: firstly, there are hardly any middle-Byzantine texts in which (historical) female monastic saints travelled extensively.37 Secondly, the current historiography stresses that women, not only nuns, in general were less free to move than men in the middle-Byzantine period, so gender norms will have intersected with perceptions on monastic mobility. We most likely will find different discourses on female monastic mobility compared to male monastic mobility, which merits a study of its own. The present study, aiming to untangle perceptions on monastic mobility and immobility, however, might provide ground for further research exploring how discourses on female mobility intersected with discourses on (male and female) monastic mobility. Apart from the tendency to observe a discrepancy between norms and practice,38 there are some studies that do aim to nuance and diversify our picture of the landscape of Eastern Roman mentalities with regard to monastic mobility, particularly the work of Daniel Caner. In a 2002 monograph Caner presents a complex picture of normative and 34 E.g., Stylites alternating their immobility with moments of mobility. For example, Symeon the Stylite the Younger (d. 592) moved from one column to the next, increasingly taller, or Daniel the Stylite (d. 493), who first travelled before settling on a column in Constantinople, or Lazarus of Mount Galesion (d. 1053), who travelled extensively during his life, but spent the last forty years of his life on top of a column. See a discussion on the mobility and immobility of Symeon and Daniel in Frank (2019). For Lazarus, see Greenfield (2000). For a discussion of the significance of (the alternation of types of) space in Lazarus’ Life, see Veikou (2016). 35 The two main studies dedicated to objections and limitations of monastic mobility are: Herman (1955); Auzépy (2009). Subsequent studies almost without exception mention an ideal of stability as providing a tension with monastic mobility, for example recently in Mitrea (2023a), pp. 3–4. 36 See a discussion of this historiography in chapter 1, section 1.1. 37 The great majority of saints’ Lives for new saints of the ninth and tenth century are celebrating male monastic saints. The female monastic saints whose Lives have survived are not portrayed as frequently undertaking longdistance travel. One of the saints’ Lives in which travel plays a role in the life of a nun is the Life of Theoktiste of Lesbos, but in modern scholarship she is considered to be a legendary figure. Nikolaou identifies a few female saints, including nuns, who travelled according to their saints’ Lives: e.g., women who travel to enter into a monastic community, sometimes cross-dressed as a man (e.g., Euphrosyne and Anna/Euphemianos), and women fleeing for Arab raids (e.g., Theodora of Thessaloniki and Theoktiste of Lesbos). See Nikolaou (2019). 38 Cf. chapter 1, section 1.1. A discrepancy between norms and practice is observed both in studies on Eastern and Western monasticism. See e.g., Luckhardt’s monograph, which draws mainly from Merovingian and Carolingian sources. Luckhardt (2020), p. 15. I
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