Introduction

The term hagiography (lit. ‘writing about saints’) bears multiple meanings. Its two principal definitions are (1) edifying compositions about the life and deeds of a holy man or woman and (2) a scholarly discipline which studies saints and the literature related to them. This essay will focus on the first definition and discuss hagiographical composition as a type of literature, but inevitably wiU also deal in part with the cult of saints (whose development was necessarily intertwined with the writing of biographies, panegyrics, and the like) and with the history of scholarship in this field.

Hagiography is frequently described as a ‘genre’ of Byzantine literature (e. g. ODB 897); however, this is a conventional term implying a ‘unified category’, which is ‘filled in fact with...varied sub-genres’ (Kazhdan 1999: 141). More appropriate is a functional definition of hagiography, which would include all kinds of literary works promoting the veneration of saints, such as acts of martyrs (passiones), vitae (lives), enkomia, accounts of translations of relics and miracles, and even hymnog-raphy. Even within a ‘sub-genre’ such as a vitUy there can be wide variation in level of style, length, content, format, and literary models. Some vitae closely resemble historical chronicles (e. g. the vita of patriarch Euthymios of Constantinople), others fairy-tales or romances {vita of Alexios homo dei, Philaretos the Merciful), yet others a basilikos logos {vita of empress Theodora, wife of Theophilos), a letter (Gregory of Nyssa’s ‘letter’ on the life of his sister, St Makrina), or a funerary oration (Gregory of Nazianzos’ orationes on his sister Gorgonia and on Basil of Caesarea).