The Textual Tradition of the Life of Saint Irene the Empress

Abstract Despite the obvious significance of Empress Irene of Athens for the history of Orthodoxy, her vita has a very poor textual tradition: a single extant manuscript and a single printed edition of the entire text. Moreover, this hagiographic writing is mostly drawn from a historical one, that is, Theophanes’ Chronographia; only the last part of the vita, which presents the exile and the dying words of Irene, seems to be the original contribution of the hagiographer. The purpose of this paper is to offer a philological and hagiological perspective on the Life of Saint Irene the Empress and to show that the shortcomings of this vita might be the main reasons for its lack of popularity.