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The world of the later Roman empire was marked by the emergence and increasing prominence of a new way of life and a new form of Christian piety in the lives of the early saints: men and women who pioneered the monastic and ascetic life in the desert and the city. This module sets out to examine the lives of a selection of these saints with two main aims: first, to understand the social world from which monks and other ascetics emerged and which they (sometimes violently) rejected; second, to read the lives of the saints as they were recorded by contemporaries, and through them to gain an understanding of the nascent genre of hagiography. Considering both historical and literary questions, the module thus explores the complex interaction of miracle stories, historical drama, and religious exhortation which characterises these texts, and the extent to which – perhaps like the saints themselves – they opposed or exploited the social conventions of their time.
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LIVES OF THE EARLY SAINTS
