CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2008
| Author | Csepregi, Ildikó |
|---|---|
| Title | The Compositional History of Greek Christian Incubation Miracle Collections: Saint Thecla, Saint Cosmas and Damian, Saint Cyrus and John, Saint Artemios |
| Summary | The history of Byzantine incubation as reflected in the dream miracle collections represents an organic development, and also a voluntarily embraced continuity. It was a transmission of the cult, the formation of the source material and the way of recording, the narrative pattern as well. This transmission from the pagan practice to the Christian incubation ritual concerned the elements of the cult, that is, the cult place, the cult function (healing) and the technique of healing as well as the ritual (temple sleep) and the medium (dream). It is common to both pagan and Christian incubation practice that the sacred place was more important than the figure of the healer and both the practice of incubation was intimately linked to the healing place. In addition to the Christianisation of the practice, the way of recording it also continued. The aim of this doctoral dissertation is to trace this formation and composition of the incubation miracles as stories, individual narratives and literary shaped miracle collections. My survey focuses on the miracles of Saint Thecla, the two versions of the miraculous cures of Saint Cosmas and Damian, that of Cyrus and John and the corpus of Saint Artemios. These collections, from the 5th – 7th centuries, from the Eastern Mediterranean, together constitute a well-defined group, differing in kind from other contemporary Byzantine hagiographical records. Focusing on the narrative aspects of these sources is justified because emerging early Christian incubation adopted not only elements of the pagan ritual but when recording it, drew heavily on the ancient narrative records of temple sleep. The development and the transformation of dream cures and its textual, literary expressions ran in parallel with each other, both being rooted in the preceding cult practice. Consequently, and rather oddly, these Christian collections of dream healing bear a closer resemblance to the incubation records of antiquity than to contemporary Christian hagiographical genres (in the form of the narrative, of course, not in its theology). |
| Supervisor | Klaniczay Gabor |
| Department | Medieval Studies PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2008/csepregii.pdf |
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