69 Mobility, immobility and sainthood on three hagiographical texts, representing narratives of widely travelling monks in the middle-Byzantine period. These are the Lives of the monastic saints Gregory of Decapolis (797-841/2; Life 842-855), Euthymius the Younger (823/4 – 898; Life 899 or early tenth century) and Elias the Younger (823-903; Life early tenth century).217 The selection of the specific emic term to be analysed in this chapter has targeted a Greek term that occurs in hagiography and that may facilitate unravelling ideas on mobility and immobility in a middle-Byzantine monastic context. In order to find meaningful results, terms functioning merely as random descriptive terms have not been considered. In contrast, the selection has focussed on terms that are essential discursive building blocks in narratives on mobility, that are important and meaningful in telling the story and that occur relatively frequently in mobility stories (as to have a big enough subset for analysis). In addition, the selected term has an ideologically charged and specific meaning in Byzantine monasticism, as this increases the chance of finding out attitudes in a specific monastic context. Moreover, this allows the results of this investigation to be a relevant starting point for further studies into other monastic texts and monastic culture, thereby not limiting the relevance of this study to the specific texts under discussion. One might assume that the best starting would be a Greek term that signifies mobility. However, there are no (ancient and medieval) Greek terms that function as an umbrellaterm for travel, migration, motion, etc., parallel to the English ‘mobility’. A candidate-term that comes somewhat close is κίνησις, motion or movement. However, this term appears infrequently in hagiography: it appears once or twice in middle-Byzantine hagiographical texts, with a few exceptions in which it occurs three or four times.218 The related lemma κίνημα is hardly found either in the middle-Byzantine hagiographies.219 Of course, there are other terms that are used to describe travel. Many verbs are used to describe episodes of travel, such as πορεύω, ἔρχομαι, ὁδεύω, βαίνω, πλέω, ἀφικνέομαι, and so on. However, there is no one verb that stands out, and all of these are merely descriptive. Then there are a few candidates that signify a journey. The most promising is ὁδός.220 The term ὁδός occurs frequently in the corpus and might thus be a potential candidate. In the selected case studies it appears 39 times (17 in the Life of Gregory of Decapolis, 16 in the Life of Elias the Younger, and 6 in the Life of Euthymius the Younger). However, a difficulty with ὁδός is that it can mean various things that are quite distinct from each other (the main non-metaphorical meanings are ‘road’ on the one hand and ‘journey/voyage’ on the other). 217 For a more elaborate discussion of the contexts surrounding the creation of these Lives, see chapter 3, sections 3.3.1, 3.4.1 and 3.5.1. 218 This is apparent from a keyword search for κίνησις and cognates in the Dumbarton Oaks Hagiography Database (consisting of Byzantine hagiographies of saints from the eight to the tenth centuries). Only in the Lives of Mary the Younger and Nikon ho Metanoeite three instances were found; four were found in the Life of Nicetas Patricius (I searched for ‘kines’ to find all the forms of κίνησις and its cognates transcribed in the database). The search resulted in 49 hits in total, in a corpus of 119 saints’ Lives. 219 Found only 9 times in the Dumbarton Oaks Hagiography Database. 220 Others are πορεία and ὁδοιπορία. 2
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