Hagiography of the Late Byzantine Period (1204-1453)

The objective of the project is to assemble the hagiographic corpus of the Late Byzantine era, digitize it, and incorporate it into an open-access online database, made available to qualified users through the issuance of individual access codes. This corpus comprises prose texts—variously popular within Byzantine society—composed in honor of saints and recounting their lives, activities, and miracles. Beyond their theological dimension, which falls within the purview of Theology, Byzantine hagiographical writings possess considerable value as written historical sources: they mirror the society that produced them and therefore command the attention of historians and philologists, while often displaying notable literary merit. The span from the recapture of Constantinople (1261) to its final fall (1453) was marked by a prolific output of new works of this genre, or by the reworking of older compositions, against a backdrop of warfare, territorial contraction, and fiscal stringency, religious disputes with political repercussions, yet also vibrant intellectual and artistic vitality. The hagiographical texts of these centuries illuminate facets of daily life, education, and economic activity, as well as the mentalities and habits of monks, clergy, and laity alike; they ultimately function as vehicles of ideological expression, shaping—at least in part—the religious and political currents of the age.

Within the project’s database the texts are divided into five categories—Lives of Saints, Encomia, Miracles, Discourses, and Unclassified—following the taxonomy of the Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca (BHG). Each entry preserves the pagination of its authoritative printed edition and is supplemented by metadata on authorship, chronology, edition, and the manuscripts that transmit the text; coupled with full-text and metadata search capabilities, the database thus constitutes a valuable instrument for research.