24 perspectives. Especially the latter has taken off in recent years.65 However, despite this long tradition and the advances made in the field, to my knowledge there is up to this date no comprehensive study on the social and ideological functions and aims of Byzantine saints’ Lives. Questions that still largely need to be addressed in a systematic way include the following: in which contexts were hagiographical texts read or heard?66 With what aims in mind did hagiographers write their texts? What were the societal effects of these stories? In other words, how did hagiography function in Byzantine society? However, in order to understand why hagiographers represented any given theme, including travel, in their texts in their particular way and what the effects were of such representation, it is necessary to take into account the aims the authors might have had when writing the texts and the potential societal functions of hagiography. In addition, we should have an idea of the performance context of hagiography, which would also be in the minds of the authors. Although there is no systematic study of this topic to date, previous studies have proposed or assumed particular functions. Therefore, what follows here is a brief overview of what we know about the performance context and audiences of hagiography and secondly a non-comprehensive overview of the main functions hagiography most likely would have had based on the insights of previous studies.67 Performance context Saints’ Lives, like many other products of medieval Greek literature, were intended to be read aloud in front of an audience.68 Although we do not know much about the particularities of these performances, we do know of some contexts in which it was read. This concerns particularly liturgical contexts. Depending on the church (and possibly on the saint), a full version of the saints’ Life may have been performed or instead, perhaps more commonly, a summary version of the Life, called a synaxarion, may have been read. For some Constantinopolitan churches we have evidence that saints’ Lives were read aloud by a professional reader, particularly during the Friday vigil. During these services, an urban audience could thus become acquainted with the stories of saints, although it is not clear how widespread such readings were in other churches and other places.69 In the 65 The publication of a two-volume companion dealing with the development of the production and genre of Byzantine hagiography in various periods and geographical contexts (volume 1) and with various (literary) themes and subgenres (volume 2) in 2011 and 2014 further stimulated the maturing of the field. Efthymiadis (2011c); Efthymiadis (2014). Two recent publications that illustrate the current attention to literary aspects, informed by narratology, of late-antique and Byzantine literature, and hagiography in particular are CorkeWebster (2020) and Messis et al. (2018). At the time of writing, a volume on the narrative construction of saints has only just appeared (which could not be incorporated systematically anymore in this thesis, but which might corroborate and expand on its insights): De Temmerman et al. (2023). 66 Stratis Papaioannou has made a valuable contribution to this issue by examining what we know about types of readership for Byzantine literature in general. Papaioannou (2021). 67 What we know specifically about the creation of the Lives of Gregory of Decapolis, Euthymius the Younger and Elias the Younger will be discussed in more detail in chapter 3, see sections 3.3.1, 3.4.1 and 3.5.1. 68 Silent and/or private reading happened as well, but most readers/listeners would become acquainted with texts through oral performance. See Papaioannou (2021); Messis and Papaioannou (2021). 69 Papaioannou (2021), p. 539.
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