420003 SE Spätantike und mittelalterliche Hagiographie (2018W)

No scholar of Late Antiquity or the Middle Ages can afford to ignore hagiography. By 'hagiography' is intended not a genre, but a type of writing (about saints and their cults) with many subtypes that can be instantiated in many different literary forms and genres (biographies, epics, epigrams, acta, miracle-collections, plays, hymns, etc).

Hagiography comes with special problems of documentation entangled with belief, forgery, historicity, and theology and a special historical methodology developed by the Bollandists (Jesuit Société des Bollandistes in Belgium), who are still directing the world’s longest-running humanities project: the Acta Sanctorum (AASS), for which see Knowles, D. Great Historical Enterprises. Problems in Monastic History. London, Edinburgh, etc., 1963.

Hagiography is an ideal general topic for a multi- or interdisciplinary seminar. It is both unified enough (we know what we are talking about) and baggy enough to incorporate pretty much all comers or topics. Historians, classicists, and theologians are obvious interested parties, but likewise art historians and students of the medieval vernaculars, musicologists and folklorists.

"Two-track model"

This seminar is intended to be accessible both to classicists and medievalists.