Chapters gathered in Syriac Hagiography: Texts and Beyond explore a wide range of Syriac hagiographical works, while following two complementary methodological approaches, i.e. literary and cultic, or formal and functional. Grouped into three main sections, these contributions reflect three interrelated ways in which we can read Syriac hagiography and further grasp its characteristics: “Texts as Literature” seeks to unfold the mechanisms of their literary composition; “Saints Textualized” offers a different perspective on the role played by hagiographical texts in the invention and/or maintenance of the cult of a particular saint or group of saints; “Beyond the Texts” presents cases in which the historical reality behind the nexus of hagiographical texts and veneration of saints can be observed in greater details.
Sergey Minov, Ph.D. (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2014), is a research fellow at Université Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV), Labex-RESMED, Paris. His research interests include the history and culture of Syriac Christianity in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, Jewish-Christian relations in the Near East, Jewish and Christian traditions of biblical exegesis and apocryphal literature.
Flavia Ruani, Ph.D. (École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris, 2012), is a researcher at the Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes, CNRS, Paris. She specialized in religious controversies attested in Syriac, Syriac manuscripts studies, hagiography, and history of Manichaeism. She translated in French the Hymns against Heresies by Ephrem the Syrian (Les Belles Lettres, 2018
All interested in late-antique and medieval Christian hagiography, especially Syriac, and in cults of saints, history, and literary studies applied to pre-modern sources.