Imprisoned martyrs on the move: reading holiness in Byzantine martyrdom accounts

Abstract

Abstract This paper shows that the protagonists of Byzantine Passions are often depicted as attaining holiness while on the move: after their arrest by pagan soldiers, Christian martyrs are subjected to travels for legal reasons. Drawing on the anthropological concept of liminality (Arnold van Gennep, Victor Turner), I will suggest that such inflicted travels or transfers in Byzantine Passions serve as liminal phases between interrogation, torture, imprisonment, and execution, by which the protagonists ascend to the state of holiness. The paper, structured in three major sections, focuses on scenes of ‘imprisoned martyrs on the move’ as delineated in both pre-Metaphrastic and Metaphrastic martyrdom accounts (fourth-tenth centuries). After a concise introduction to the theoretical background and the text corpus of this study, the main sections explicate the motif of imposed movement in conjunction with the literary construction of holiness, the spiritual formation of the audience, and the structure of a martyrdom narrative.