IMC 2018: Sessions
Session 1518: Visions of Community, II: Comparative Perspectives on Medieval Biographical Collections
Thursday 5 July 2018, 09.00-10.30
| Sponsor: | Sonderforschungsbereich Project 'Visions of Community', Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Universität Wien / FWF Project F42 |
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| Organisers: | Rutger Kramer, Institut für Mittelalterforschung, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Wien Veronika Wieser, Institut für Mittelalterforschung, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Wien |
| Moderator/Chair: | Jamie Kreiner, Department of History, University of Georgia, Athens |
| Paper 1518-a | A Comparative Approach to Medieval Biographical Collections from Rasulid South Arabia (Language: English) Index terms: Anthropology, Islamic and Arabic Studies, Political Thought, Religious Life |
| Paper 1518-b | Constructing a Mediterranean Church Community: Reading Gennadius' Continuation of Jerome's De Viris Illustribus (Language: English) Index terms: Hagiography, Historiography - Medieval, Learning (The Classical Inheritance), Religious Life |
| Paper 1518-c | A Community Redone: The Gesta Sanctorum Rotonensium in a Comparative Context (Language: English) Index terms: Anthropology, Hagiography, Manuscripts and Palaeography, Monasticism |
| Paper 1518-d | The Eminent Life: Collected Stories in the 6th Century from Gregory of Tours to Hui Jiao of Jiaxiang Monastery (Language: English) Index terms: Historiography - Medieval, Historiography - Modern Scholarship |
| Abstract | A hitherto underappreciated aspect of medieval 'life writing' is their appearance as part of a series or collection. Whether as compilations of individual texts or as original compositions focusing on multiple life stories, the collective nature of such narratives adds layers of depth to the visions of community contained within. As this session will show, looking at such narratives as a series of stories and their institutional settings allows us to reframe such comparative studies away from the Western European ideal figure of the (Christian) saint and towards different examples focusing on the collective life and its authors. Daniel Mahoney will open this panel by showing the comparative potential of these biographical collections. Starting from medieval Islamic texts, specifically from Rasulid South Arabia, he will emphasise how similarities and differences based on various compilation and writing strategies shed light on the motivations and the intended audience of the compilers. Veronika Wieser will place Christian traditions of biographical and genealogical writing in a diachronic perspective by examining Gennadius' Continuation of Jerome's catalogue On Illustrious Men. It will analyse how Gennadius used the catalogue to document the growth of the Christian Church as a singular community against the backdrop of a rapidly changing political landscape of 5th-century Western Europe. Rutger Kramer will zoom in on a single community, and show how the strategies of inclusion and exclusion employed in the series of lives in the second book of the Breton Deeds of the Saints of Redon helped prepare the community for the future. Finally, James Palmer will present methodological observations on the apparent structural universality of 6th-century 'serial biographies' in the Latin, Greek, Syriac and Chinese worlds. Starting from Gregory of Tours' hagiographical texts and Hui Jiao's Gaoseng zhuan, he will reflect upon the ground rules for comparative hagiology by stretching ideas about commonalities and differences beyond Christian-European norms. |