Talk. Stephanos Efthymiadis
Stephanos Efthymiadis will be giving a guest lecture on "The two vitae posteriores of saint Epiphanios of Salamis (BHG 601a and 601b) and their metaphrastic technique" at the University of Southern Denmark on Friday 17 June at 1:15 CET. All are welcome to join the talk at SDU or online via Teams.
To register and receive link please write to cml@sdu.dk
Stephanos Efthymiadis is Professor at the Open University of Cyprus. He has published numerous studies on Byzantine hagiography, historiography and prosopography. He edited the two-volume Ashgate Research Companion on Byzantine Hagiography. He co-edited the volume ‘Niketas Choniates: a Historian and a Writer’ (with Alicia Simpson, La Pomme d’or, Geneva). A volume of collected articles on Byzantine hagiography appeared in the Variorum series (2011). In 2021 he published the critical edition, translation, and commentary of the Life of St Bacchos the Younger (together with André Binggeli in Byzantina Sorbonensia) and a monograph on the Byzantine Hagiography of Cyprus. He is currently working on a book on the Social History of Hagia Sophia of Constantinople.
Abstract
Epiphanios of Salamis (ca. 305-403) is among the late antique saintly bishops to whom, in addition to an early biography composed after the mid-fifth century, several later hagiographical texts were dedicated. His rather thick hagiographical dossier comprises two so far unedited vitae that must have been written between the ninth and the twelfth centuries. They both rely on Epiphanios’ late antique long biography, a fact that their authors are prompt to acknowledge, and have come down to us in a codex unicus. Though sharing in the tendency to elaborate upon their model-text and produce shorter and more compact redactions of it, they diverge from one another in terms of prose style and thematic orientation.
Along with discussing the history of the transmission of these two vitae posteriores of Epiphanios, this lecture will survey their metaphrastic perspective as reflected in the selection and reworking of topics and diction. Questions regarding the interdependence of the two texts will be also addressed as well as how each one contributes to drawing a precise portrait of their subject. An attempt will be finally made to place these compositions in a particular historical milieu.