206 2. Be attuned to the possibility of a plurality of discourses, rather than trying to construct a single pervasive discourse. The general introduction recognised that a perception of travel as dangerous surely was one of the associations Byzantine people had with reference to mobility. This perception has been presented as the dominant one in modern historiography. This dissertation has found that other associations with mobility existed as well, and that there was a diversity of discourses. Multivocality was most apparent from the discourse analysis of hesychia, where we observed that the Lives of Euthymius and Gregory represented one discourse, and the Life of Elias another. In addition, opposing conceptual metaphors implied contradictory thought patterns. These metaphorical patterns suggested that both ways of thinking were deeply ingrained in the way medieval-Greek language users of the ninth and early tenth century thought and perceived the world. So both on a narrative level as well as on a conceptual level, we perceived diversity with regard to Eastern Roman reflections on mobility and immobility. 3. Ask which factors contribute to particular views on mobility and immobility With regard to the identity of the movers, we should recognise the limitations of this study. We only studied male monastic movers. This means that we do not yet have a comparison with other types of movers, although this may be a fruitful avenue for future research. We did observe that the monastic identity of the movers in question mattered, as the represented travel motivations were often connected to this identity. They moved to become a monk, to achieve monastic ideals, to visit other monks and to establish monasteries. Particularly their constructed identity as ascetics aiming to cut bonds with worldly affairs represented mobility in search of isolation and separation as positive. The represented reasons why monks moved correlated, to a degree, to particular (positive) discourses on mobility. The monks travelled for many different reasons in the narratives, and as discussed above, most of these were shown to have positive effects on the mover and/or on the receiving society. However, certain types of mobility were represented more prominently than others, and particularly these were reflected positively on their identities and constructions as saints. These motivations can be summarised as mobility as a divine quest, mobility for spiritual or monastic development, and mobility as the fulfilment of God’s plan. These types of mobility presumably reflected, or else aimed to impose, a positive moral evaluation of these journeys. The types of spaces of the destinations, regardless of the specific location, mattered greatly in the narrative representation of monastic mobility. Caves, islands, mountains, and other places of relative isolation were represented as conductive for spiritual development. In evaluating whether the place of origin or of the destination mattered for normative
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