“Did You Come to Murder My Child?”: Early Byzantine Family in the Light of the Greek Miracle Collections

Mothers and their children are the most common family members to appear in early Byzantine collections of miracles. But we also find fathers, married couples and, in individual cases, even grandmothers or sisters-in-law. In my presentation, I will focus on which family configurations and for which issues and needs people of that time visited the shrines of the saints. On the other hand, I will show how the saints depicted in these works use family connections to influence and put people’s intentions, beliefs, and feelings to the test. I will thus try to reconstruct the multifaceted picture emerging from this type of literary source in order to look at the early Byzantine family from the side of the religious beliefs and practices of the time related to the cult of the saints.