209 Conclusion for forms of late-antique monastic mobility, in these middle-Byzantine Lives mobility itself was not represented as a spiritual practice.678 As will be elaborated on below, the narratives equally represent travel as a means to advance monastic careers. Also in this regard, it is not the movement itself that is portrayed as facilitating social mobility, but the transfer to new places and new communities. It was not about the journey, but about the destination. Diverse travel motivations Another similarity between all three Lives is that the represented motivations for travel are manifold. Rather than representing the journeys of monks as falling in one category, the Lives of Gregory, Euthymius and Elias include multiple types of motivations. Several of these motivations fall into categories that are not specific to moving monks, but reflect that the monks are part of broader patterns of movers. Such journeys include, for example, involuntary mobility, educational mobility, professional mobility and pilgrimage. By representing all these various types in the Lives, the authors connect their stories to a recognisable reality of Mediterranean mobility and show that the monks share experiences with other movers. This strategy of representation may be related to various authorial aims and social functions of hagiography: hagiography as commemoration and hagiography as persuasion. The travel motivations may align with what the hagiographer knew about the actual motivations of the monks, and they may have wished to document these. It is also likely that the hagiographers aimed to relate the moving monks to a recognisable reality in order to make their narratives plausible and believable. This could enhance the persuasive character of their texts. Some travel motivations represent the monks instead as special movers, connecting (im)mobility and sainthood. (Im)mobility and sainthood The representation of (im)mobility turns out to be interwoven with the construction of sainthood in the three Lives in at least four ways. The first is that immobility itself is understood as a virtue in the narratives. For example, we saw in the Lives of Gregory and Euthymius that staying at particular places is instrumental for reaching the ideal of hesychia. The semantic analysis moreover confirms that the term hesychia, among other sematic layers, signifies physical rest. This conclusion may seem to corroborate the existing scholarly discourse that identifies stabilitas loci as a monastic ideal of immobility. However, it does not. Whereas stabilitas loci implies the primacy of monasteries as loci for monks to stay and remain, reaching hesychia is not limited to monastic establishments: I showed that other types of spaces are associated with hesychia as well. Moreover, the sources from which scholars infer an ideal of stabilitas loci reflect normative discourses according to which monks ought to stay in a (monastic) community. Hesychia in a way embodies the opposite. Hesychia is associated with a degree of social isolation, not with community 678 This was argued for in e.g., Dietz (2005). C
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