Holiness on the Move: Mobility and Space in Byzantine Hagiography

Mihail Mitrea is a Lecturer in Byzantine history at the Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca and a senior researcher in Byzantine philology at the Institute for South-East European Studies of the Romanian Academy in Bucharest. He holds a PhD in Classics from the University of Edinburgh (2018). His research was funded by the European Commission (MSCA – IF), Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, and the Alexander S. Onassis Foundation. He is currently an Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cologne. His research was published in Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies, and Travaux et Mémoires. His research interests include hagiography, epistolography, and prayers in late Byzantium, manuscript studies, and textual criticism.

1. A saint in space: mobility and distance in the Life of Cyril Phileotes / 2. Space, narrative, and compositional structure: constructing authority in the Life of Lazaros of Mount Galesion (BHG 979) / 3. Boundaries of holiness: biography and narrative structure in John Xiphilinos’ Miracula and Passio of St Eugenios of Trebizond / 4. "I went aboard a ship and reached Byzantium:" the motif of travel in edifying stories / 5. The Oration on St John of Damascus by Constantine Akropolites (BHG 885) and its source (BHG 884): a spatial reading / 6. Holiness abroad: Greek saints and hagiography in Norman Italy / 7. Local pilgrimage and historical identity in Slavonic hagiography in Greek translation: two accounts from the Archbishopric of Ohrid / 8. Pilgrimage in thirteenth-century Byzantine Greece: the Life of Barnabas and Sophronios / 9. Theodore the Stoudite on exile / 10. The metaphor of road in Byzantine hagiography