32 by studying an emic term in its narrative contexts.106 More specifically, it will ask what we can (and cannot) learn about Byzantine attitudes towards monastic mobility by studying a spiritually significant term for (inner) rest – hesychia – in the Lives of Gregory, Euthymius and Elias. Chapter 3 will focus on the authors’ interpretation of the saints’ journeys. It will ask how their motivations to set on a journey are represented. In addition, it will ask what these representations may teach us on perceptions of monastic travel. The final chapter, chapter 4, takes a cognitive linguistic approach and explores the potential of studying conceptual metaphors to uncover underlying thought patterns regarding movement and stability. In addition to learning about discourses and perceptions of monastic (im)mobility, this study presents an opportunity to examine how Eastern Romans promoted particular contemporary individuals as more special than others, worthy of veneration, in an attempt to incorporate them in the ever filling calendar of saints’ feasts. For late antiquity, there has been plenty of research investigating the origins, the functions, typologies and other aspects of saints’ cults ever since Peter Brown.107 Medieval Greek hagiography from all periods has received considerable scholarly attention as well. However, a question that has not often been asked explicitly, especially for the middle-Byzantine period, is exactly how authors tried to present their fellow-contemporaries as new saints and how they tried to communicate their sanctity to the audiences. In this dissertation, this question will be asked with regard to the topic of (im)mobility: how did authors use, or not use, the celebrated individuals’ (im)mobility in their narrative strategies to construct sainthood? Were these monks promoted as saints despite, indifferent to or because of their travels? 106 I use emic to refer to a term originating from within the medieval Greek hagiographical tradition itself, rather than a term originating from another (etic) context, such as modern categories of analysis. For the distinction between emic/etic, see e.g., Agar (2007); Flemming (2010). 107 Brown (1971); Brown (1981); Brown (1983).
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