Text, Image, and the “Visionary Body” in Early Byzantine Hagiography: Incubation and the Rise of the Christian Image Cult

Abstract

This study reasserts the importance of images for the Christian saints’ cult during the sixth and seventh centuries, and draws attention to the abundant extant pilgrims’ eulogiai that that have been largely overlooked heretofore. In particular, it highlights the existence of a fiercely contested debate in early Byzantium about the visibility of the disembodied human soul, and specifically the role that images of the Christian saints and angels played in adjudicating the claims of the various parties to this controversy. It contends that references to images of the saints in pre-iconoclastic hagiography should not be automatically dismissed as anachronistic interpolations, but viewed from the perspective of a debate about the nature of the saints’ “visionary body.” It also argues that the widespread availability of images of the saints in contexts of worship formed an established of the saints’ cult in the early Byzantine period, especially in incubatory shrines.

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