Writing ‘True Stories’: Historians and Hagiographers in the Late Antique and Medieval Near East (review)

Writing ‘True Stories’ is a rather enjoyable collection of essays. Well-written and chosen, the collection builds on each successive essay, leaving as many questions as conclusions in the reader’s mind when the collection has been consigned to the shelf.

The collection builds on a panel organized for the 21st International Congress of Byzantine Studies, with additional papers and revisions commissioned for publication under the ‘Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages’ series. The collection clearly embraces the themes and potential of the series, expanding on crosscultural research that considers interactions of genres to illuminate a series of texts chosen from a multiplicity of traditions.

Ostensibly, the essays examine the ‘relation between history and hagiography as the main two narrative modes of representing the past in the late antique and medieval Near East’. Conceptually, the essays are contextualized by a fine Introduction by Catherine Cubitt that provides the ‘view from the West’ – situating the essays and texts examined not simply within their own milieu but also within larger discourses of the construction of history, hagiography, and historiography from across the late classical and medieval West. This grounding not only helps those unfamiliar with the interactions of Byzantine and Islamic cultures, or the myriad traditions of Coptic and Syriac churches but implicitly spurs the reader to ask questions about the construction of history, purpose, culture, influence, and identity across multiple fields and eras.

In ‘stirring the pot’ of the Late Antique and Medieval Near East, the reader leaves the collection confronted by key concerns for any academic: What is history? Who defines it? Who uses it? To what purposes is it, has it, and can it be put? The articles of Binggeli, Bray, and Davis are particularly solid in examining similar tropes or stories used across multiple faiths and traditions. Muriel Debié spends the opening section of her article on East Syriac historiography by examining the vocabulary used to describe and determine ‘history’ in East Syria, and the implications that the vocabulary had for its framing of both historical and hagiographical narratives. Genre is also a major field of exploration, with the boundaries and uses of saints’ lives, letters, chronicles, and histories all examined.

Each essay stands as a call for further thought and investigation: the questions asked are crucial to our understanding of ourselves as historians, and it is well worth such a refreshing journey through them again.