Ebook: Holy Women of Byzantium: Ten Saints' Lives in English Translation

Dumbarton Oaks is launching a series of English translations of medieval Greek Lives of saints to bring a selected group of these biographies of holy men and women to the attention of a wider public. It is hoped that this new series will make available in translation a genre of medieval Greek text that has hitherto been relatively inaccessible. At present, the majority of the Byzantine Greek texts that have been translated into English are narrative histories or writings of the Church Fathers; these should now be complemented by other types of materials. This project to translate saints’ Lives is not, in fact, a new idea, but one rooted in tradition, for many of the Greek Lives of saints were translated into Latin, Slavonic, Syriac, Armenian, Georgian, and Arabic during the early Christian and Byzantine centuries to make them accessible to non-Greek speakers.

The rationale for devoting the first volume of the series to selected Lives of female saints is the notable paucity of translations in English (or indeed any western European language) of the vitae of Byzantine holy women, especially for the post-Justinianic period. Therefore, an attempt has been made to include most of the vitae of holy women of the middle and late Byzantine centuries, which are relatively few in number, in addition to some earlier saints who exemplify certain types, such as nuns who adopted male monastic habit and female hermits.