Final Report Summary - NOVELSAINTS (Novel Saints. Ancient novelistic heroism in the hagiography of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages)
The novel is today the most popular literary genre worldwide. This project has contributed to (re-)writing its early history. It has offered the first comprehensive reconstruction and interpretation of the persistence of ancient novelistic material in (Greek, Latin, Syriac, Arabic, Armenian, Georgian and Coptic) hagiographical narrative traditions in the Mediterranean in Late Antiquity (4th-8th cent.) and the early Middle Ages (8th-12th cent.).
Even though these eras are now seen by historians, classicists, medievalists and Byzantinists as crucial transition periods between Antiquity and the ‘high’ Middle Ages, they have long constituted a blind spot of several centuries on the radar of scholars working on the history of the novel, who conceptualized them as an ‘empty’ interim period between the latest ancient representatives of the genre (4th cent.) and its re-emergence in 11th/12th-century Byzantium and 11th-century Persia. This project has advanced and validated the hypothesis that different hagiographical traditions throughout Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages were impacted (directly or indirectly) by ancient novelistic influences of different kinds and adopted, rehearsed, re-used and adapted them to various degrees in order to represent saints as heroes/heroines. In this sense, (re)constructions of heroism in these traditions should be understood, at least partly, as ‘novelistic’ and raise crucial issues about fictionalization and the texts’ own implicit conceptualizations of fiction as a literary form.
The project has unearthed new material, filled lacunae in scholarship through a number of in-depth studies, and examined continuity of hagiographical strands of novelistic heroism in narrative genres from the 11th and 12th centuries in the West (medieval romance), Byzantium (novels) and the East (Persian romance).
Even though these eras are now seen by historians, classicists, medievalists and Byzantinists as crucial transition periods between Antiquity and the ‘high’ Middle Ages, they have long constituted a blind spot of several centuries on the radar of scholars working on the history of the novel, who conceptualized them as an ‘empty’ interim period between the latest ancient representatives of the genre (4th cent.) and its re-emergence in 11th/12th-century Byzantium and 11th-century Persia. This project has advanced and validated the hypothesis that different hagiographical traditions throughout Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages were impacted (directly or indirectly) by ancient novelistic influences of different kinds and adopted, rehearsed, re-used and adapted them to various degrees in order to represent saints as heroes/heroines. In this sense, (re)constructions of heroism in these traditions should be understood, at least partly, as ‘novelistic’ and raise crucial issues about fictionalization and the texts’ own implicit conceptualizations of fiction as a literary form.
The project has unearthed new material, filled lacunae in scholarship through a number of in-depth studies, and examined continuity of hagiographical strands of novelistic heroism in narrative genres from the 11th and 12th centuries in the West (medieval romance), Byzantium (novels) and the East (Persian romance).