Saints at the Limits: Seven Byzantine Popular Legends

Saints at the Limits is a collection of medieval tales of Byzantine saints, translated into English for the first time. The stories feature protagonists from all walks of life who travel to exotic lands, perform miracles, and negotiate the boundaries between the human and the divine. The tales resonate with readers today who are seeking to understand universal human fears and desires in their Byzantine guise.

Format: Hardback
Length: 400 pages
Publication date: 26 May 2023
Publisher: Harvard University Press

Saints at the Limits: A Collection of Medieval Tales of Byzantine Saints

The legends collected in Saints at the Limits, despite sometimes being viewed with suspicion by the Church, fascinated Christians during the Middle Ages. As related cults, multiple retellings, and contemporary translations attest, their protagonists span the entire spectrum of Byzantine society, including foreigners, soldiers, ascetics, lustful women, beggars, and the sons and daughters of rulers. They travel to exotic lands, perform outlandish miracles, suffer extraordinary violence, reject family ties, save cities, destroy absolute rulers, and discover the divine. Some saints, like Markos the Athenian, are forgotten nowadays; others, like Saint George the Great Martyr, still command a wide appeal. Each, however, negotiates the limits of Byzantine imagination: the borders that separate the powerful from the outcasts, the real from the imaginary, the human from the beyond human.

These stories, edited in Greek and translated into English here for the first time, continue to resonate with readers seeking to understand universal human fears and desires in their Byzantine guise.

Dimension: 203 x 133 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780674290792