Palladius of Helenopolis: One Author, Two Ways to Write

Abstract

The present article analyzes the narrative strategies and discursive conventions that Palladius of Hellenopolis employed in his works, the Dialogue and the Lausiac History, and proposes the reasons why one author could produce two such disparate works. I use the concepts and approaches offered by reader-response criticism in order to differentiate between an implied audience of the historical narrative as the narrative itself mediates it, and the historical audience, i.e., real people of flesh and blood who read the book in the past. The ways in which Palladius chose to present certain topics (the attitude to wisdom and foolishness, eschatological expectations, the appearance of righteous men, male and female ascetics living together, and the attitude to pride) are important indicators of how he envisioned the audiences of the Dialogue and the Lausiac History, and that, to a larger extent, accounts for the impression of the remarkable difference between the two works. An attempt is made to correlate these implied audiences with the diverse groups in Palladius's immediate milieu and to hypothesize about the real first-hand readers of his works, who were ready and willing to internalize his assumptions and expectations.

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