Tag: hagiography

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Confinement in Byzantine Narrative, Part I: Martyrs and the Threshold of Holiness

One of the questions that has long fascinated me is how human beings experience the spaces around them, and how those experiences are shaped, narrated, and transformed in literature. In the Byzantine world – stretching from 330, when Constantinople became the new capital of the Roman Empire, to 1453, when it fell to the Ottomans – literature was a window into these experiences, capturing how people imagined and interpreted space.

Among the many spaces that captured Byzantine imagination, few are as revealing as the prison. The narratives of Christian martyrs – stories inspired by the early Christian persecutions (first to fourth centuries) yet mostly composed during the Byzantine era – portray imprisonment not merely as suffering, but as a spiritual turning point. These texts recount the trials of devout men and women who were interrogated, tortured, imprisoned, and executed for refusing to renounce their faith. I first became deeply interested in this topic while examining how confinement was depicted in Byzantine hagiography, a line of inquiry that culminated in my monograph Gefängnis als Schwellenraum in der byzantinischen Hagiographie (Prison as a Liminal Space in Byzantine Hagiography, De Gruyter, 2021) . In this first part of a two-part blog, I return to that subject to explore the prison as a threshold space – one that mediates between human endurance and divine transformation.

Why start with martyrs? Among all genres of Byzantine literature, martyrs’ Passions – accounts of Christian martyrdom – offer the richest and most detailed depictions of imprisonment. These accounts were not only compelling to read but also deeply instructive, showing how imprisonment shaped a martyr’s journey toward holiness. In light of our own recent global experiences of confinement, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic, these medieval depictions of (in)voluntary isolation speak to us in new ways.

Prison as a Threshold

In martyr narratives, the prison is more than a location – it is a liminal space, a threshold between the human and the divine. After enduring brutal tortures, the martyr is thrown into a cell, often bloodied and near death. Conditions are harsh: hunger, thirst, vermin, filth, and extreme overcrowding challenge the body and spirit. Yet, the prison also becomes a space of transformation.

Inside these walls, martyrs pray fervently, and divine intervention is depicted in vivid ways. Christ or angels may appear to heal or strengthen them. Dreams and visions bring the imprisoned closer to God and the promise of Paradise. Simultaneously, martyrs often convert visitors and heal fellow prisoners, demonstrating that the prison is also a space of active spiritual engagement. It is here that martyrs begin to transcend their human limitations and move toward sanctity.

The Martyrdom of Eudoxios, Romylos, Zenon, and Makarios, from an illustrated Menologion (eleventh century, London, British Library, Codex Add. 11870, fol. 67r).  This miniature shows the transition from torture to imprisonment and highlights the prison as a space of spiritual transformation.

Sometimes, the narratives even hint at the possibility of escape, yet martyrs choose to remain. They understand imprisonment as a necessary step on the path to holiness, a phase through which they must pass to achieve ultimate communion with God.

Beyond Martyrs: Voluntary Confinement of Ascetics and Monks

While martyrs faced forced imprisonment, Byzantine literature also explores voluntary forms of confinement, particularly among ascetics and monastics. These individuals deliberately withdrew from society, seeking solitude in caves or cells to cultivate spiritual virtues. Here, too, the space of confinement is transformative.

The ascetic’s cell or cave is not a site of punishment, but of self-imposed discipline. The narratives show how sustained solitude shapes character, deepens devotion, and influences the progression of the story itself. By examining both involuntary and voluntary forms of confinement, we can see a continuum of experiences: whether imposed by external authorities or chosen freely, these spaces are intimately linked with personal and spiritual growth.

The Martyrdom of Lucian of Antioch, from the Menologion of Basil II (ca. 1000, Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Codex Vat. gr. 1613, p. 115). The image is divided into two scenes: on the left, Lucian sits alone in his dark cell; on the right, his executioner casts his body into the sea. According to the text, Lucian dies of starvation in prison – his cell thus becomes both his place of death and of spiritual rebirth. The juxtaposition underscores the prison’s central role in shaping the martyr’s fate and ultimate sanctity.

Why These Stories Matter Today

You might wonder: why should readers care about Byzantine martyr narratives today? Part of the answer lies in their timeless human themes. Confinement – whether imposed or voluntary – forces reflection, endurance, and transformation. In our contemporary world, moments of isolation, such as quarantine or personal retreat, echo the ancient experiences depicted in these texts. By understanding how Byzantines imagined and narrated confinement, we gain insight not only into a distant past but also into our own relationship with space, suffering, and growth.

Moreover, these texts offer a rare glimpse into the Byzantine worldview. Hagiographies – texts dedicated to the lives of saints – served multiple purposes: honoring saints, promoting veneration, instructing readers in moral and ethical behavior, and even entertaining them with vivid depictions of daily life, including violence and crime. In this sense, Byzantine hagiographies were a medieval form of “television,” engaging their audience on many levels.

The richness of these texts, preserved across centuries, allows scholars and enthusiasts alike to explore a world where physical spaces and spiritual journeys are inseparably intertwined. The prison is not simply a place of punishment; it is a threshold, a transformative environment, shaping human experience and bringing one closer to the divine.

In studying how Byzantines imagined confinement, we discover not only their mindset, but something essential about ourselves: the ways in which the human spirit turns limitation into transcendence.

Christodoulos Papavarnavas
Visiting Assistant Research Professor
Medieval Institute
University of Notre Dame

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Jacques de Vitry’s Defense of the Beguines

We want to like the prologue to Jacques de Vitry’s hagiography (c. 1216) of thirteenth-century holy woman Marie d’Oignies. It serves as a defense of the beguines: a grassroots movement of pious women inventing new ways of living a religious life alone or in community outside a formal monastic environment. But some of Jacques’ thoughts do not sit well with modern sensibilities:

It is sufficiently demonstrated that [the beguines] clung to the Lord during the destruction of the city of Liege. Those who could not flee to the churches threw themselves into the river and chose to die rather than to incur harm to their chastity. Some jumped into dung-filled sewers and preferred to be snuffed out in stink than to be despoiled of their virginity. Despite all this, the merciful Bridegroom so deigned to look after His brides that not a single one in such a great multitude was found who suffered either death to her body or harm to her chastity. [1]

Exactly what the modern reader wants to hear: it is better for a woman to kill herself than be raped. To the vita’s target audience, however, the beguines’ actions function as proof of their commitment to a religious life outside the formal claustration and celibacy vow of a convent. Their survival is evidence for God’s approval of their way of life.

The vita of Marie, moreover, is not the only time multi-continental bishop, preacher, and very prolific author Jacques talks about a literal leap of faith in service of religious order justification. In one of his Sermones Vulgares, Jacques seeks to exhort crusaders, and especially Templar knights, to spiritual greatness:

I have heard from a certain Templar that at the very beginning of the order, while they were still poor and very fervent in religion, that he himself was coming from the city of Tyre, bringing money and alms which they had received to the city of Acre. He came to a certain place, which has been called ‘Templar’s Leap,’ ever since. For the Saracens had placed an ambush for that noble knight, in a place where on one side there was a sheer cliff and on the other the deepest sea lay below, while the Saracens besieged him from in front and behind on the narrow path. As he had no where to turn, he urged his horse with the spurs, and leapt from the lofty cliff with the horse into the depths of the sea. But the horse – as it pleased the Lord – carried him unharmed to the shore. (trans. Helen Nicholson) [2]

Medaglia celebrativa di Jacques de Vitry del 1518

At first, the story appears to be a near-direct parallel to that of the Liege beguines. A Templar, facing violation of his life and mission (delivery of the money, a nice nod to the Templars’ fabled role as “the world’s first international bank”), chooses to jump from high ground into water, a plunge likely to end in his death. In this case, too, God intervenes, and the Templar’s life is preserved.

But on second glance, the Templar’s leap does not mirror the beguines’ actions so much as cast them into stark relief. In his crusade sermon, Jacques relates the knight’s mental process as he leapt off the cliff: he hoped and prayed that God would deliver him safely. The beguines, according to the bishop, hoped only that they would die.

Dyan Elliott has suggested that the story of the Liege beguines, propagated during the Albigensian Crusade against presumed Cathars in France, functions as anti-Cathar polemic. Orthodox martyrs do not die, so lay people who die in service to claimed religion are heretics, not martyrs. [3] Elliott skips over the underlying contention in her discussion of martyrdom, but it is worth drawing out in a discussion of beguines and sanctity. Jacques’ argument only works as anti-heretic polemic if the audience already stipulates the orthodoxy of the beguines. In other words, the vita prologue is a collective hagiography preaching (literally) to the choir, not an argument for an inquisitive audience. I’m more interested, though, in modern revulsion and the theological position Jacques implicitly stakes on a different topic: suicide.

Print of a Beguine in Des dodes dantz of Matthäus Brandis, Lübeck 1489.

Setting aside the views and experiences of women themselves, the rape of religious women was a theologically painful problem for medieval theologians—a problem bound up with suicide from the earliest centuries of Christian theology, thanks to the interplay with the classical tradition and the story of Lucretia. And Jacques and his hagiographical beguines were not necessarily on the right side. Augustine discusses the dilemma at some length in City of God I.16-19, arguing that the virtue of virginity is ultimately a matter of the will; the integrity of the body only reflects the sanctity of the will insofar as the person has control over it. [4] “We maintain that when a woman is violated while her soul admits no consent to the iniquity, but remains inviolably chaste, the sin is not hers, but his who violates her.” (I.19) He continues on to drive home his point that suicide is a mortal sin, period:

Therefore a woman who has been violated by the sin of another, and without any consent of her own, has no cause to put herself to death; much less has she cause to commit suicide in order to avoid such violation, for in that case she commits certain homicide to prevent a crime which is uncertain as yet, and not her own. (I.18)

The apparent universal survival of the Liege beguines, furthermore, is no magic arrow for Jacques to avoid the problem of actions with a desired outcome of suicide. Medieval doctrine–in point of fact, even Augustine in that same section of City of God–was clear that intention was a crucial factor in determining a sin.

This is where the comparison with the Crusade sermon becomes so revealing. The knight explicitly hopes to survive, even if he knows it is mathematically unlikely. Jacques could have given his hagiographical beguines this way out, but he did not. “Two of the enemy came to her in a boat and intended to commit vile fornication with her. But what can happen to the chaste among lions, to a lamb among wolves, to a dove among eagles? She preferred to sink again into the river than to be violated.” [5] The Liege beguines’ intention is death, or more flatly: their intention is to kill themselves. Despite this fairly flat contradiction of Church doctrine, Jacques intended this scene as an argument for the legitimacy of the beguines’ lifestyle.

The premium that Christianity places on martyrdom has long carried the uncomfortable flip side of where to draw the line between accepting one’s death and making one’s death happen. The rhetorical strategies of Jacques de Vitry in his vita of Marie d’Oignies and his Crusade sermons add an additional gendered dimension onto the dilemma. And in light of Jacques’ goal to promote the beguine movement, a comparison of the two texts suggests that when it came to arguing for orthodoxy, might heterodoxy be the best policy?

Cait Stevenson, PhD.
Medieval Institute
University of Notre Dame

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[1] Jacques de Vitry, The Life of Marie d’Oignies, trans. Margot L. King (Peregrina, 1987), 19.

[2] H.J. Nicholson, trans., “Jacques de Vitry: Sermons to a Military Order,” De Re Militari: The Society for Medieval Military History, April 12, 2014.

[3] Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 2004), 65.

[4] Augustine, City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (T&T Clark, 1913), digitized here.

[5] Life of Marie d’Oignies, 19.

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Medieval Women You Should Know: Anna Laminit

Anna Laminit (c.1480-1518) was one of late medieval Europe’s popular “living saints” or “holy women,” modern terms for women who were considered to have a privileged relationship with God during their lives as well as after death. For nearly fifteen years, she provided spiritual advice and (possibly) physical healing to everyone from pious laywomen to university professors to the Holy Roman Emperor. She was famous as far away as France, compared to living saints in Italy.

And she may have been one of late medieval Europe’s most successful con artists.

Our major sources for Laminit’s life are three Augsburg chronicles written after the fact but by men who were present in the city during her reign and fall. Regarding Laminit, the three offer different details but agree on all major points, and they are uniformly hostile to her.

Laminit came from a family of Augsburg artisans. She was supposedly exiled from the city as a teenager for “mischief,” probably some sort of sexual misconduct, but the punishment may have been largely symbolic. By seventeen or eighteen, she was back in the city and living at a charity-funded group residence for pious widows and unmarried women. Shortly thereafter, it seems, more and more people around her started to believe she was surviving on no food except the Eucharist—the surest sign of God’s special favor. The divine provenance of her inedia was certified by the fact that she tried to eat but was unable (it was not a human feat), and her confessor’s approval of her foregoing earthly food (demonstrating her obedience to the clergy).

Unlike most holy women, Laminit seems to have lacked the typical “powerful (male) cleric” promoter. The only places her confessor are even mentioned are her own supposed legal statement included in Rem’s chronicle, and his later charge that she lied to her confessor. Nevertheless, her fame spread throughout Augsburg and beyond.

Chroniclers stress the high social status of her local visitors; a pre-Reformation Martin Luther stopped to consult with her on his way home from Rome. Some people visited her for advice (sourced from God’s communications to Laminit, of course), others simply to experience proximity to a vessel of God’s grace, and probably others to observe something exotic and exciting. Some copies of Clemens Sender’s chronicle add an interesting detail: Laminit and a group of her women friends used to travel around the countryside outside Augsburg providing healing services.

Other people took advantage of her spiritual power from afar. Many devout Augsburgers donated their money to Laminit for her to distribute to the poor, thus increasing the amount of God’s good will that would reflect back on the original donors. Others donated money and goods to Laminit herself, including a private house near one of Augsburg’s most prestigious churches.

Unlike with other holy women, sources make no mention of a particular powerful (male) cleric who supported and promoted Laminit. However, the Church gladly offered a vehicle for her mutually beneficial social and spiritual climb. She received a designated seat for weekly Mass in the church near her house, drawing more people (and money) to it. Her response to outbreaks of apocalyptic fear in Augsburg and beyond was to call for Church-led penitential processions through the city (also featuring her, of course). Indeed, the sources agree that in the first decade of the sixteenth century, Anna Laminit was “St. Anna” to everyone in Augsburg and beyond.

Everyone except the duchess of Bavaria.

Daughter of one emperor and sister to another, Kunigunde of Austria had retired to a Munich convent after the death of her husband Albrecht, duke of Bavaria, in 1508. And when she invited (“invited”) Laminit to Munich in 1513, she had more in mind than a consultation with a saint. She and the other sisters gave Laminit her own private chamber—a chamber specially prepared with holes in the door. And the first night, they observed Laminit do the one thing a holy woman was not supposed to do: eat. Food under the bed and excrement outside the window confirmed the charade.

According to her supposed confession, Laminit claimed that God had allowed her to eat that one time because she was so weak from travel. But nobody was interested in listening. The discovery that she ate one time was enough to unravel more than a decade of adulation and trust. Despite the animosity reflected by the invective used against Laminit in some of the chronicles, her only punishment was exile from Augsburg—apparently with a good piece of the money people had donated to her over the previous decade.

As for Laminit’s life after sainthood, Rem provides the most (and most colorful) details. Apparently she got married and ended up in Freiburg. And if Rem can be believed, she and her husband spent the next five years running a con based on, of all things, child support fraud. But the game was up when the non-existent child’s father wanted to meet him, and Laminit was executed by drowning in 1518.

Laminit’s end has led to her neglect as a late medieval holy woman in modern scholarship. But despite—or perhaps because of—the ultimate belief that her sanctity was a fraud, the sources that discuss her life are invaluable for insight into popular devotion to living saints and the lives of those saints at the end of the Middle Ages.

Cait Stevenson
PhD in Medieval Studies
University of Notre Dame

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Secondary

Roth, Friedrich. “Die geistliche Betrügerin Anna Laminit von Augsburg (ca. 1480–1518).” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 43 (1924): 355–417.

Weigelt, Sylvia. „Der Männer Lust und Freude sein”. Frauen um Luther. Wartburg-Verlag, 2011.

Primary

Preu, Georg. “Die Chronik des Augsburger Malers Georg Preu des Älteren.” In Die Chroniken der schwäbischen Städte: Augsburg, vol. 6, 18-86. S. Hirzel, 1906.

Rem, Wilhelm. “Cronica newer geschichten.” In Die Chroniken der schwäbischen Städte: Augsburg, vol. 5, 1-245. S. Hirzel, 1896.

Sender, Clemens. “Die Chronik von Clemens Sender.” In Die Chroniken der schwäbischen Städte: Augsburg, vol. 4, 1-404. S. Hirzel, 1894.