31 Introduction and to consider Lives written in the mid-tenth century and especially from the eleventh century onwards as a new phase for the hagiographical genre.105 Methodology and structure One of the reasons why scholars have not yet reconsidered views on (monastic) mobility and immobility is perhaps because it is notoriously difficult to establish what people in the past were actually thinking, and to look beyond the particular discursive aims of the texts of our authors, especially when using hagiography. This thesis therefore may also be seen as a methodological experiment: chapters 2 to 4 will each approach the three saints’ Lives using a different approach, and will ask what we can and cannot learn about mentalities on monastic mobility from each of these approaches. As each chapter takes a different approach, these approaches will be elaborated on in the individual chapters. They all have in common that they are based on a close reading of case studies and they are informed by discourse analysis. Language takes central stage in this thesis. Language enables, structures, and limits our thinking, so one of the ways in which we may attempt to get into the minds of historical people is through the language they used. Particular aspects of medieval Greek language used by the authors are notably on the forefront of chapters 2 and 4. These chapters investigate which language of mobility and immobility was used, what words mean in their narrative contexts, how particular words are used, how we can see patterns of language use and what this tells us about how these medieval Greek language users thought. The other main perspective explored as a way into past mentalities is through representation. By focussing on representation, while recognising the discursive aims of the authors and taking into account what we know about the contexts of the creation and performance of these texts, chapter 3 asks what we can learn about perceptions by the way in which monastic travel is represented in the narratives. Unlike the other three chapters, chapter 1 does not deal with hagiography. Rather, it reconsiders a societal ideal of immobility in relation to which the current historiography discusses and interprets Eastern Roman monastic mobility, that of stabilitas loci. In order to verify the historical foundation of this ideal and to find out what it actually meant, the chapter analyses the key sources on which previous scholars have based this ideal: the Long Rules of Basil of Caesarea, the canons of the Council of Chalcedon and the Novels of Justinian. Subsequently chapters 2 to 4 turn towards the Lives of Gregory, Euthymius and Elias. They all revolve around the question what we can learn about Eastern Roman attitudes towards monastic mobility. Chapter 2 examines what we can learn about past perceptions 105 Efthymiadis similarly considered the period for hagiographical production of the ninth and early tenth century as ‘between two cultural borderlines in Byzantine history, namely the literary and artistic eclipse of the years c. 650800 sometimes known as the Byzantine ‘Dark Age’ and the composition of such collections as the Metaphrastic Menologion and the Synaxarion of Constantinople’, see Efthymiadis (2011a). I
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