Metaphrasis of John Xiphilinos: His Technique(s) of Rewriting Saints’ Lives

Originally composed in Greek by the eleventh-century Byzantine literatus John Xiphilinos the Younger, the Menologion of saints’ lives survives today only in Old Georgian manuscripts. Thanks to the Gerda Henkel Stiftung-funded project on John Xiphilinos’ Saints’ Lives, several of these texts have recently been recovered and translated into English. Building on these translations, this paper examines Xiphilinos’ metaphrastic technique(s) and their role in shaping the transmission and reinterpretation of sanctity in the late Middle Byzantine period. Xiphilinos’ access to earlier material varied widely: while some saints – such as George and Panteleimon – were supported by rich dossiers of pre-metaphrastic and metaphrastic narratives, others had only brief synaxarial notices. For instance, Xiphilinos expanded the minimal synaxarial entry of St. Orentius and his six brothers into a fully developed metaphrastic life, demonstrating his ability to transform skeletal commemorations into elaborate narratives. In some cases, Old Slavonic versions illuminate lost Greek sources on which Xiphilinos relied. This paper focuses on representative examples that reveal his diverse compositional strategies. Rather than following a single method, Xiphilinos engaged with previous traditions in varied ways, adapting and reconfiguring his models to produce a distinctly hybrid Menologion – a dynamic corpus in which each saint’s life entered by its own route. The collection reflects both fidelity to inherited models and creative reworking, illustrating the fluidity of Byzantine hagiography and its adaptability to new literary, theological, and devotional contexts.