5 III 2026: Julia Doroszewska (UW), Subversive Sainthood: Late Antique Hagiography as Evidence for Religious Mentality

Subversive Sainthood: Late Antique Hagiography as Evidence for Religious Mentality

My presentation reconsiders late antique Greek miracle collections that are often read as pious entertainment, arguing instead that they preserve unusually rich traces of how Christians imagined the sacred operating in ordinary life. The talk draws on the main arguments of my new book, “Trickster Saints and Their Manifestations and Miracles in Late Antique Hagiography”, to propose that “eccentric” saints are not marginal figures but a coherent hagiographic type once we take seriously their recurring trickster traits: radical ambiguity (human/divine, present/absent), performative disguise and unexpected epiphanies, riddling communication, prank-like healings and punishments, and the deliberate inversion of social and moral expectations.

After situating miracle narratives within the lived contexts of shrines, pilgrimage, incubation, and competitive healing cultures, I show how hagiographers stage saintly presence through two interlocking registers: *modes of appearing* (elusive, theatrical manifestations) and *modes of acting* (disruptive plots of cure, correction, and humiliation). Particular attention is given to episodes that mobilize “low” materials, bodily shame, or taboo-adjacent scenes—not as lapses in taste, but as narrative strategies that intensify affect, test devotion, and compel interpretation.

In closing, I suggest that these texts are valuable evidence for late antique religious mentality precisely because they normalize paradox: a world in which holiness is expected to be unsettling as well as consoling, playful as well as punitive, and in which divine power is most persuasive when it destabilizes everyday assumptions and forces communities to renegotiate what counts as justice, mercy, and presence.