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Metaphrasis: A Byzantine Concept of Rewriting and Its Hagiographical Products represents a first and authoritative discussion of rewriting in Byzantium. It brings together a rich variety of articles that treat the topic of hagiographical rewriting from various angles.The contributors discuss and comment on different kinds of texts in Greek and other languages, including Apophthegmata Patrum, Passions, Saints' Lives, Enkomia, Miracle Collections, Synaxaria, and Menologia which date from late antiquity to late Byzantium. The volume offers a series of case studies examining how the same legends evolved through time by the process of rewriting. It is shown that the main driving force behind such rewriting was adaptation to different audiences and contexts. This work argues that rewriting is central to Christian cultures in the Middle Ages. Contributors are Andria Andreou, Anne Alwis, Stavroula Constantinou, Koen de Temmerman, Kristoffel Demoen, Marina Detoraki, Bernard Flusin, Laura Franco, Martin Hinterberger, Christian Høgel, Daria D. Resh, Klazina Staat, Julie van Pelt, Robert Wisniewski, and † John Wortley.

In premodernity, a time when human milk was the only safe means of infant nutrition, and in societies, such as those of classical antiquity and early Byzantium, where breastfeeding was considered servile work, wet-nursing was both a necessary and widespread occupation. Despite the social demand for the profession, public discourses around wet nurses were mostly negative, while their work was treated with both admiration and scorn. In an attempt to understand ancient and early Byzantine approaches to the wet nurse, this article takes a matricentric perspective. It investigates various discourses (rhetorical, moralist, philosophical, theological, hagiographical, medical and contractual) which establish the wet nurse as an essential part of the institution of motherhood, as a social and moral category whose work, way of life and behaviour are constantly defined, controlled and regulated. These discourses nevertheless tell us much more about the anxieties and preoccupations of the societies that produced them and much less about actual contemporary wet nurses. The choice of an investigation encompassing antiquity up to early Byzantium, an extension rarely seen in existing studies, further illuminates the mechanics and dynamics of the ideologies around the wet nurse, as these are preserved or evolve in time.

This article is a first attempt to approach the figure of the storyteller in three types of early Byzantine tale collections (fourth–seventh centuries): collective biography, miracle collection, and collection of edifying tales. Our approach draws significantly on Walter Benjamin's discussion of the storyteller and Monica Fludernik's work on conversational storytelling. Our analysis has a twofold purpose: first, to revise the impression that the storyteller is a canonical force that possesses the same characteristics in every single tale; second, to suggest that the storyteller is an inherent feature of short hagiographical narratives.

Comparative approaches to political rituals and ceremonies in Byzantium and other court cultures of the Mediterranean basin form the subject of this collective volume, which examines related topics from the viewpoint of transformation, succession, appropriation, and representation in art and literature.

This volume represents the first discussion of rewriting in Byzantium. It brings together a rich variety of articles treating hagiographical rewriting from various angles. The contributors discuss and comment on different kinds of texts from late antiquity to late Byzantium.

This chapter explores that Byzantine hagiographical narratives abound with dreams and visions and Dreams and visions have also other functions, both religious and narrative. A number of visions and dreams, such as Theopistos' dream, keep the story going while others assist the unfolding of the plot by changing its direction. There are also a number of dreams and visions fulfilling other important narrative functions, such as the preparation of the narrative's closure. At this point it should be mentioned that dream as a healing medium is employed much more often by the hagiographers of the early Byzantine period than by those of the later periods. In fact, dream is almost the only healing method in the early collections. The healing dreams of Byzantine miracle collections might be divided into three large groups according to the way in which a cure is performed. These are: the corporeal dreams, the medical dreams and the allegorical dreams.