Retrieving a Forgotten Byzantine Hagiography Collection from Georgian: John Xiphilinos’ Saints’ Lives

The project aims to study a neglected eleventh-to-twelfth-century collection of saints’ lives (hagiographies), initially written in Greek by a prominent Byzantine court intellectual, John Xiphilinos the Younger, nowadays preserved only in Old Georgian translation. The collection follows a long tradition of hagiographical compilations dedicated to the Byzantine emperors (tenth–twelfth century). Nevertheless, it is a sole collection non-extant in the original Greek, besides being the last of this kind in Byzantium. Such collections influenced the Byzantine religious everyday life, liturgical practices, and piety by following the order of saints’ feasts according to liturgical calendars. They were literary products, collections used in religious contexts, and often tools in political propaganda.
This collection of saints’ lives is likely not the sole work Xiphilinos produced at the Byzantine court; he was also the historiography author. He wrote the Epitome, abbreviating Dio Cassius’ Roman History. Since Dio Cassius’ work is not entirely preserved, the research of his Roman history largely depends on Xiphilinos’ Epitome. We cannot entirely grasp Xiphilinos’ contribution to Roman history or his general oeuvre without knowing the literary style of his other works, including the collection targeted by this project. Its unavailability left gaps for those who study Roman history, Classics, Byzantine studies, hagiography, and liturgical calendars.
Besides recovering Xiphilinos’ thirteen saints’ lives from manuscripts and making them available for a wider audience by translating them into English, this project will first focus on the questions of Xiphilinos’ sources and his rewriting method, helped by intertextuality and narratology. The prominence and variation of Xiphilinos’ rewriting style compared to his predecessors will provide conclusions about the specificity of his collection, the cessation of such practice after his time, and the general Byzantine piety and belief in saints at the turn of the twelfth century. Second, this project will compare Xiphilinos’ rewriting method of hagiography with the way he reworked his Epitome. Finally, by studying the calendar Xiphilinos used to align texts in his collection, we will examine whether he intended to voice the imagined Byzantine imperial geography by choosing specific saints’ lives. We will mainly target the lives of saints coming from the peripheral areas of Byzantium, by which Xiphilinos may have drawn his imagined imperial geography by stretching the empire’s borders.
Besides making available this piece of Byzantine Greek, or we better say, common European pre-modern heritage from the total negligence and oblivion, this project will explain how the literature about saints was entangled not only in religious and cultural but also in political affairs in Byzantium in the turn of the twelfth century.