Prof. Dr. Bardo M. Gauly

The project examines the language and literary form of Latin hagiography in late antiquity, a period in which linguistic and cultural spaces increasingly diversified. The discursive character of hagiography, which comprises a variety of sub-literary and literary forms and languages, simultaneously offers an approach to the study of late antique culture as a whole due to the various possible functions of these texts. They compete with pagan literature and transform it at the same time; they advocate an alternative way of life; they claim to bring the reader closer to divinity; occasionally, they inscribe the hagiographer into the hagiography, thus putting the former into proximity with divinity; they create forms of memory and veneration and at the same time establish a Christian narrative literature.

The project seeks to analyze diverse literary forms that refer back to a variety of pagan genres (biography, letter, historiography, epic and lyric). It further examines the competition with the contemporaneous pagan philosophers’ vita, the transformation of the antique tradition which, for instance, converts myth into cultural heritage or pagan natural history into narrative material. The project is also interested in how a new form of narrative literature is established which replaces both the high-literary epic of antiquity and the novel marginalized in ancient culture, investigates the performative character of the texts that ascribe divinity rather than describe it, and the literary self-constitution of a new Christian elite. The study is complemented by a bilingual and annotated edition of hagiographical works.

The project is affiliated with a research group led by senior research fellow Alexander Arweiler (Münster) and myself, which is publishing the bilingual edition of the “Bibliothek der lateinischen Literatur der Spätantike (BLLS).

Recent relevant publications:

Claudians Phoenix und die Frage der Allegorie, in: Stenger, Jan R. (ed.): Spätantike Konzeptionen von Literatur, Heidelberg: Winter 2015 (BkA N.F. 2,149 = The library of the other antiquity), 115-134.

Pronuba fit Natura deis: Liebesgötter und Natur in Claudians Gedicht über den Magneten, in: Hömke, Nicola [et al.] (eds.): Bilder von dem Einen Gott. Die Rhetorik des Bildes in monotheistischen Gottesdarstellungen der Spätantike, Berlin 2016 (Philologus Suppl. 6), 217-233.

Ausonius’ Cupido cruciatus und die Liebe zum Mythos, in: Gauly, Bardo Maria / Müller, Gernot Michael / Rathmann, Michael (eds.): Dialoge mit dem Altertum. Sinnstiftungen aus der Vergangenheit in Antike, Früher Neuzeit und Moderne, Heidelberg 2019 (BkA 159), 143–160.

Von Löwen und Mönchen: Tiere in spätantiker Hagiographie, AuA 65/66 (2020), 174-189.

Alexander Arweiler / B. G.: Wer soll(te) das lesen? Der Clemensroman literarisch betrachtet, in: Vielberg, Meinolf (ed.): Rufinus von Aquileia, Übersetzung der Pseudoklementinischen Rekognitionen, 2 vols., Stuttgart: Steiner 2021 (BLLS 2.1), 261-282.

Heiligkeit und Monument: Die Heilige und der Hagiograph in Hieronymus’ Epitaphium Paulae, in: Gauly, Bardo M. / Neumann, Michael (eds.): Entzeitlichung, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann [in press].