8 Acknowledgements This dissertation is the result of almost five years of research, and several years of academic training before that. Many people and institutions contributed to the completion of the project. I wish to acknowledge them here. The research project was funded and thus made possible by the HLCS research institute (later RICH) of the Faculty of Arts of Radboud University. Further financial support was provided through the Tsiter-Kontopoulou stipend for a research stay at the Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies at Universität Wien, the Erasmus+ programme of the European Commission, the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome (KNIR) and OIKOS, the National Research School in Classical Studies in the Netherlands. The first people I owe my gratitude to are my supervisors, Olivier Hekster, Daniëlle Slootjes and Lien Foubert. I am immensely grateful for their trust in me to carry out this research in the first place and for their continued trust and encouragement along the way. They were surprisingly often of the same mind, while each of them also added a unique perspective. Together they formed the perfect supervising team and I always enjoyed our discussions together. They read many (!) drafts of chapters, provided essential constructive feedback, asked me critical questions, helped me move forward whenever I got stuck again, made suggestions to improve my (too) long sentences such as this one. In other words, they did everything and more that you would hope from good supervisors. Not only did they do that – they were also incredibly supportive whenever other aspects of life were demanding my attention instead. I am truly grateful for all that. When I made my first steps in academia I had never even heard of Byzantium, let alone dreamed spending many years trying to understand this society. Two outstanding teachers during my Bachelor’s degree, Helle Hochscheid and Hans Bloemsma, planted the seeds for my fascination with Byzantium and inspired an enthusiasm for academic research. Without them I might have never landed on this path. It is difficult to know whether the monks I studied actually enjoyed moving to many different places, but I certainly did, while trying to understand their world. I always gained much inspiration from research stays, visiting conferences, and taking courses. Fortunately, this required regular travels. Apart from the interaction with the hagiographical sources themselves, interactions with fellow researchers from all over the world inspired me the most. There are many individuals whom I had the pleasure to meet and exchange ideas with, but I would like to specifically mention the following people: the many Byzantinists I met during my research stay in Vienna, especially Claudia Rapp and Ewald Kislinger for generously sharing their expertise and the fellow PhDs for making me feel very welcome and socially imbedded in the department, the inspiring teachers who helped me improve my medieval Greek, especially Niels Gaul at the Boğaziçi summer school and Alexander Alexakis and Stratis Papaioannou at the Dumbarton Oaks one, and finally the organisers
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