Metaphrasis and Gender. The Fluid Lives of Female Saints in Greek Menologia

In the Christian tradition, martyrdom accounts and saints’ Lives occupy, after the Bible and the liturgical prayers, a position of central importance.

This project focuses on accounts of female saints and traces their path through the process of inclusion in various types of collections, as well as the ensuing rewriting.

Many texts were abbreviated to fit into e.g. synaxaria, or rewritten from a stylistic perspective, from simple texts into literary, learned prose.

All this also entailed a selection process, as some texts were not deemed worthy of stylistic elevation or inclusion in collections.

Symeon Metaphrastes, the redactor of the Metaphrastic menologion, included only 28 accounts of female saints in his collection of 148 rewritten texts.

This project will disclose the criteria for selection and reworking that he and other redactors adopted, with an emphasis on all aspects of the process – the transmission history, the thematic crosspollination between texts of similar content, and the underlying theological and societal notions.

Employing new terminology – the concept of displacement – and creating a dynamic library for these texts with new digital tools, the project will shed light on types of rewriting by taking into account different levels of displacement and variations of gendered language, the Greek orthodox canonization process showing which saints were included, and the implications for the notion of female sanctity in the orthodox world.