Byzantine Metaphrastic Hagiography among South Slavs: A Quantitative View
Byzantine Metaphrastic Hagiography among South Slavs: A Quantitative View

Summary/Abstract: Symeon Metaphrastes, a Byzantine court official of the tenth century, commenced a comprehensive literary-religious project, the Metaphrastic Menologion, where numerous early Christian hagiographies were rewritten according to the standards that contributed to their stylistic improvement and language adjustment. The lives of saints reworked in the Metaphrastic Menologion were later widely distributed and read in the Byzantine world. Considering the reputation that the collection had in Byzantium, one may find it surprising that only some texts of the Menologion were transmitted among the South Slavs, and even these quite tardy. This paper offers a quantitative overview of the metaphrastic transmission in the South Slavic world, based on the numbers of manuscripts and texts. It further discusses the saints whose lives the stories describe, primarily from the thirteenth and the fourteenth century, as well as the types of manuscripts in which they appear. Finally, I consider the distinctiveness and significance of metaphrastic hagiography within the contents of the Slavonic manuscript book covers.

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