1st Edition
Irenaeus of Sirmium and His Story in the Medieval East and West Remembering a Lesser Saint
The study of hagiographies has generally been focused on the more prominent saints of late antiquity and the Middle Ages who inspired significant and long-lasting veneration. However, this has caused many less-well-known saints to be pushed aside and forgotten.
This book is a study into one such saint, Irenaeus, a martyr who was killed in 304 CE in Sirmium, Pannonia. His short-lived cult, his feast day, and the account of his martyrdom (which had been translated into Latin, Greek, Old Slavonic, Georgian, and Armenian) had all been forgotten during the Middle Ages. This book examines Irenaeus of Sirmium’s life, cult, sainthood, and eventual disappearance from the memory of medieval Christendom, in the context of a wider study on the memory of those less-well-known saints who, like Irenaeus, became neglected and eventually forgotten.
Irenaeus of Sirmium and His Story in the Medieval East and West will be of interest to scholars and students alike interested in hagiography, medieval literature and history, as well as all those interested in the religious history of Byzantium, medieval Europe, and the Slavic world.
1. Irenaeus of Sirmium: memory and forgetting
2. Manuscript geography and memory of a saint
3. "Remember me on this day": feast days, calendars, and hagiographical collections
4. Medieval attempts to revive the cult of Irenaeus
5. "Numberless Ways to Tell a Story": textual transformations of Irenaeus’ Martyrdom
6. Appropriation of the past: the Martyrdom of Irenaeus in Byzantine Imperial Menologia and canons
7. Epilogue: memory of Irenaeus in Sremska Mitrovica today
8. Afterword
Biography
Marijana Vuković is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Southern Denmark and a visiting researcher at the Centre for Medieval Literature (Odense). She holds two PhD degrees, one in Medieval Studies from the Central European University in Budapest (2015), and a second in Religious and Literary History of the Middle Ages from the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas of the University of Oslo (2018). Her previous postdoctoral positions include the University of Warsaw (2018).
