Todd French: The Compilatory Impetus: Prefaces and Strategies in Late Antique Hagiographies

The impulse to compile saints’ lives in Late Antiquity is well-attested by the collections of John Moschos, John of Ephesus, Cyril of Scythopolis, Theodoret of Cyrrhos, and Palladios. This paper examines the authorial intent communicated by these authors in their prefaces and literary asides. Drawing on the methodologies of Somerville and Brasington’s 1998 work with the prefaces to canon law books and Patricia Cox Miller’s 1983 text on biography and authorship, this research brings the communicated compilatory strategies of these authors into conversation with each other and their chosen styles, theological influences, and political landscapes. Since most of these compilations dabble in the tropical formulations of their antecedents, this paper will track longitudinally how these authors navigated the prefaces and asides of their works and how their positionality within the framework of authorial intent is imagined. Understanding how these writers conceived of their role as author and compiler, and the influence they had on their successors—some direct, others presumed—enriches the conversation around reception history of late antique compilations. The contours of the authors’ relationships with their compilations offer rich possibilities for interpreting how and why saints’ lives became the vehicle par excellence for communicating and prescribing a range of religious meaning through to the Middle Ages.