Mapping Miracles in Byzantine Hagiography: The Development of the Legend of St Alexios

Abstract

Hagiographical narrative is often examined through the well-established text-critical principle according to which the earliest text is necessarily the most skeletal in outline, the least wondrous in plot, and therefore the most historically believable. According to this view, to the bare bones of truth, fanciful narrative and miraculous tales are added with time, as the tale grows in the telling. The development of the Legend of St Alexios has been viewed as a case in point. The idiosyncratic life-story of this fourth-century ascete has been described as evolving from a nucleus of ‘fact’, essentially coinciding with the early Syriac Life, to a romanced complexity with the Byzantine version influencing the later versions in all major romance languages. Consequently, critics have isolated and, to a large extent, derided the ‘miraculous’ element in the plot, while failing to articulate an understanding of the role of miracles in Alexios’s Life.