28 of persuasion. That is, to convince all members of the audience of the sainthood of the individual they were celebrating.89 Promoting saints could be (partially) motivated by economic or political interests, for example, aiming to attract pilgrims to the relics of the saint or aiming to increase the spiritual standing of the monastery, by boasting a saintly founder, and hoping to attract donations to the monastery. In the middle-Byzantine period, the liturgical calendar was already full of established saints, so an author presumably would have hoped to compete with other hagiographies as well in an attempt to insert their saint into the canon. In the few years between their deaths and the writing of the saints’ Lives, the cults may not have been widely recognised or spread. Moreover, for new saints the recognition of their sainthood was not a given. As Anthony Kaldellis has convincingly argued, the genre of hagiography frequently reveals that (some) Eastern Romans were sceptical of the sainthood of their fellow humans on earth, especially of their miraculous powers.90 By including episodes of doubt and scepticism in the narratives, the hagiographers aimed to forestall potential scepticism from the audiences.91 In order to convince the audience of the celebrated individual’s sainthood, the narrative had to be credible. A degree of historicity, or at least plausibility, might thus also be in the interest of the persuasive aims of the text. Additionally, the Life had to present the individual as embodying a recognised model of sainthood. What sainthood constitutes, however, is not a stable given. Different types of saints illustrate that there is variety in concurrent, and sometimes competing, conceptions of sainthood.92 Hagiography could also contribute in constructing these very conceptions of sainthood. Saints’ Lives could therefore be seen as carefully crafted texts that balance between anchoring individuals in already excepted and valued models of sainthood and potentially arguing for or promoting new conceptions. Hagiography could thus argue for many things all at once: for a particular organisation of society, for particular ideals of behaviour, for the establishing of the celebrated individual’s sainthood, and for particular conceptions of sainthood. The construction of sainthood of the protagonists in the case studies will be a main theme throughout this thesis, especially how it is connected in various ways to the monks’ mobility and immobility. 89 With regard to aims of hagiographers, persuasion is thus very close to devotion. That is, by convincing others of the sainthood of the celebrated hero, the hagiographers probably would have hoped to increase devotion to the saint, and to promote his or her cult. 90 Kaldellis (2014). This is also the view expressed by Douglas Whalin on the purpose of hagiography: ‘Hagiographies were written with the specific agenda of establishing and memorializing the sanctity of their protagonists. Their purpose was not just to reassure believers but to convince sceptics’. Whalin (2021), p. 95. On scepticism and incredulity with regard to saints in late antiquity, see also Dal Santo (2012). 91 The narratives often include episodes that (aim to) prove the wrongness of sceptics, who may be fellow ‘orthodox’ Christians, but also heretics, Jews or even demons. 92 Two main models of sainthood are often recognised in scholarship: martyrs and confessor saints, those who were considered holy due to their deaths and those who were considered holy because of their lives. There is great diversity in the category of confessor saints, but they have in common a combination of an appreciation of their way of life as an ideal Christian way of life and the possession of supernatural powers. See e.g., the lucid discussion of models of sainthood in Klaniczay (2014).
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