Trickster Saints and Their Manifestations and Miracles in Late Antique Hagiography

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-032-89227-6
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 288 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 453 g

Reihe: Religion, Medicine and Health in Late Antiquity

This book explores how late antique miracle collections depict Christian saints as subversive, theatrical tricksters who blur the boundaries between sacred and profane, human and divine.

Readers will gain a fresh perspective on the cultural and theological imagination of Late Antiquity through a detailed analysis of Greek hagiographic texts. Doroszewska combines literary, religious, and anthropological approaches to show how saints functioned as shape-shifting, paradoxical figures—divine jesters who used ambiguity, humor, and disruption to communicate the sacred. The chronological framework of this study spans from the 5th to the 7th/8th century, exploring the emergence, heyday, and eventual decline of miracle collections following the Arab conquest. The volume demonstrates that idiosyncrasies in the characterisation of the saints in these texts form a coherent model when approached with the template of the trickster paradigm, offering a readers new understanding of sainthood in late antique Christianity.

Trickster Saints and Their Manifestations and Miracles in Late Antique Hagiography is suitable for scholars and students of late antique Christianity, hagiography, religious studies, classical studies, and those interested in the intersections of literature, folklore, and cultural history.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate and Undergraduate Advanced

Autoren/Hrsg.

Doroszewska, Julia

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Christentum, Christliche Theologie Christentum/Christliche Theologie Allgemein
• Geisteswissenschaften Christentum, Christliche Theologie Christliche Kirchen, Konfessionen, Denominationen
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Alte Geschichte & Archäologie Mittelalterliche, neuzeitliche Archäologie (Europa)
• Geisteswissenschaften Religionswissenschaft Religionswissenschaft Allgemein Religionsgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Christentum, Christliche Theologie Kirchengeschichte Hagiographie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction; Part 1. Manifestations. Schema: The Looks; 1. Boundary Crossers: Ambiguous and Ambivalent Personalities; 2. Shape-Shifters: ‘True Guises’ and Disguises in Performative Saintly Manifestations; Part 2. Miracles. Schema: The Plots; 3. Sacred Bricoleurs; 4. Mischief-Makers and Trick-Players; 5. Situation-Invertors and Taboo-Breakers; 6. Conclusion: Divine Jesters as Messengers and Interpreters of God.

Über Autor(innen)

Julia Doroszewska is a Research Fellow at the Faculty of History, University of Warsaw, Poland. She is the author of The Monstrous World: Corporeal Discourses in Phlegon of Tralles’ “Mirabilia” and has published widely on liminal phenomena in Greek and Roman pagan and Christian cultures.