Hagiography, the literature inspired by the acts, the miracles and the sayings of holy men and women, is a substantial part of the medieval cultural legacy, offering a non-official version of history. These narratives constitute important sources for anthropologists and sociologists and, through their various and constantly revised forms, they can also convey political ideas and offer new ways to understand the transmission of cultural memory.
Latin hagiographical legends that found their way into Greek are fewer than Greek hagiographical texts translated into Latin, and have therefore been overlooked by modern scholars. However, these texts help us to better understand contacts between West and East during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, reversing the traditional perspective represented by the basic flow of translations made from Greek into Latin.
This interdisciplinary project sets out to explain how Greek hagiography translated from Latin functioned as a vector of cultural transfers in Byzantium, by making accessible major unpublished material. It contributes to a better understanding of this process through the examination of the dossier of the Greek versions of the Vita Sancti Hilarionis (hereinafter VH). This Latin hagiographical text was composed by Saint Jerome, considered as the “Father of Translation”, at the end of the 4th century, in Bethlehem. Born around 291, the monk Hilarion is known as the founder of Gazan monasticism. Although the importance of the VH as a major source for the development of Gazan monasticism has often been stressed, very little critical attention has been devoted to its translation into Greek. The Greek dossier of the VH constitutes an extremely rare case of hagiographical translations from Latin into Greek, a phenomenon not as well documented as the opposite flow of translations, from Greek into Latin, as it includes many different Greek versions. The Byzantine rewritings of the Latin legend of Hilarion are an ideal starting point to explain how Byzantium receives and transforms Western cultural objects. As a result, the project focuses on the re-semantisation that the Latin legend of Hilarion undergoes, while being transferred to the Byzantine world.
The project maps out the bilingual Greek-Latin communities in Byzantium that gave rise to the transfer of Latin legends into Greek, focusing on the networks of various actors (interpreters, translators, scribes, audiences etc.) that took part in the fabrication, the circulation and the reception of these texts. Specific attention is paid to the dynamics that gave rise to these Greek-speaking and Latin-speaking diasporas, such as immigration. The mechanisms of interaction between local and foreign populations find an echo in contemporary European societies, drawing on the anthropological concepts of cultural hybridity and acculturation.
