What is it about?
What does the migration of tales reveal about the role of storytelling in the human experience? This paper addresses a specific dimension of this complex and wide-ranging question by analyzing a fascinating phenomenon in early Byzantine literary history: the migration of hagiographical texts from Byzantium to Ethiopia. The analysis focuses on several hagiographical texts (i.e. tales on the lives, deeds, and often outlandish deaths of saints and martyrs) that travelled across the Incense Route. The Incense Route was a network of ancient land and sea trading routes which connected the harbor of Alexandria to Ethiopia, Yemen, and India through the plains and coastal towns of inner Egypt and Arabia. Along with myrrh, cassia, Arabic frankincense, silk, and Indian gold, a significant amount of medieval tales and legends about Christian saints and martyrs travelled along this route, and from the palaces of Byzantium they reached the monasteries and the Christian circles of Ethiopia. By comparing the extant versions in Eastern Christian languages of the originally Byzantine hagiographical tale, it is possible to track the foci of interest across linguistic and theological boundaries. A reading of these philological findings through the lens of narrative theory enables us to discover a response to the initial question. Hagiographical tales travelled along the Incense Route because they fulfilled a transcultural, diverse, yet common need: to find enchantment in the physical world.
Featured Image
Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Stories shape the human encounter with the world. But this is not new. The history of literature is full of figures whose reality is profoundly transformed, for both the best and the worst, by interacting with stories: from Don Quixote and his maddening thirst for adventure to Emma Bovary and her luring love fantasies, from King Shahryar in the Arabian Nights to Paolo and Francesca in the fifth canto of Dante’s Divine Comedy. In addition, plenty of work – in philosophy, literary theory, religious studies, theology – has long demonstrated the power of literature and stories to extend, diminish, and transform reality. The present essay augments these studies by revealing that the study of textual transmission of the late ancient and medieval Eastern Christian hagiographies of the Incense Route brings to light a specific aspect of that broader phenomenon, a specifically religious aspect, namely the capacity of stories to transform the reader’s imagination and perception of the world, making a tear in the fabric of reality so as to let the transcendent shine through. A merchant, traveler, pilgrim, or soldier passing by the shrine of Menas near Alexandria might have experienced this place differently after reading the related tale, because they would have known that that place was the site where the body of a martyr performed miracles of healing; a place where the divine powers were manifested; a place permeated by the holy.
Perspectives
My hope is that this study will get people to think about the transformative power of literature for the imagination. In an age of defunding of the humanities, we can use a reminder of how stories can remake our world, extending the limits of what we can imagine, experience, and do.
Nicolò Sassi
Saint Louis University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Circulation of Hagiographical Tales along the Incense Route: Storytelling as Technology of Enchantment, October 2024, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004707351_008.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
