Project description
How female cross-dressing saints’ Eastern traditions spread
The practice of female saints disguising themselves as men to enter monastic life originated in Eastern Christian traditions, such as Greek and Coptic Christianity. In the Middle Ages, these stories spread into Latin and Romance literary traditions. They offer a unique perspective on how gender, identity, and authority were negotiated across the Mediterranean. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the DiSCuS project will examine how these narratives were disseminated during the Middle Ages by identifying and mapping manuscript witnesses across Eastern and Western traditions. It will produce open-access digital editions and English translations of key texts, allowing for direct comparison in order to understand how motives were adapted and transformed across cultures.
Objective
DiSCuS – Disguised Sanctity: Cross-cultural Saints and Cultural Transfer in the Medieval Mediterranean explores how stories of female saints who disguised themselves as men to enter monastic life travelled across cultures and languages in the Middle Ages. Originating in Eastern Christian traditions (Greek, Syriac, Coptic, Arabic), these narratives spread to Latin and Romance literatures, where they were reinterpreted within new social and theological contexts, within and beyond hagiography. They offer a unique lens to study how ideas of gender, identity, and authority were negotiated across the Mediterranean.
The project has three objectives: (1) to identify and map all known manuscript witnesses of these narratives in Eastern and Western traditions; (2) to produce OA digital editions and English translations of the main texts, presented in a synoptic format for direct comparison; (3) to develop a comparative model explaining how such motifs were adapted, re-used, and transformed across time and cultures.
DiSCuS combines philology, history, gender studies, anthropology, and DH, ensuring a strongly interdisciplinary approach. The research will take place across three institutions: Yale (Eastern hagiography and manuscript studies), Helwan (Arabic and Coptic traditions), and the University of Genoa (Romance philology, digital editing, and reintegration). This three-way collaboration will guarantee knowledge exchange, innovative methodologies, and long-term sustainability.
By producing the first comprehensive corpus of cross-dressing saints and making it freely accessible, DiSCuS contributes to Horizon Europe Cluster 2 (“Culture, Creativity and Inclusive Society”) and to the UN 2030 Agenda (Quality Education, Reduced Inequalities). The project will create durable resources for scholars, teachers, and cultural institutions, while engaging the wider public in rethinking the Middle Ages as a period of cultural interaction and diversity.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- social sciences educational sciences didactics
- humanities history and archaeology history
- humanities languages and literature literature studies literary genres
- social sciences sociology anthropology
- humanities languages and literature literature studies history of literature
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-GF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF
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16126 GENOVA
Italy
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