Translating a Saint: Mary of Egypt Across Genres

This paper explores the transformations of the figure of Mary of Egypt across a range of Byzantine poetic texts. It considers verse retellings of Sophronios’s Life of Mary of Egypt, non-narrative poems inspired by her story, and the Grottaferrata version of Digenis Akritis, which reconfigures elements of her legend within a different narrative framework. By tracing how Mary’s story moves from prose to verse and across distinct poetic genres, I examine the reworking of key motifs, the shifting balance between narrative and non-narrative modes, and the mechanisms that shape these textual transformations. In sum, the paper seeks to clarify the dynamics of adaptation and the processes through which Mary’s figure is continually reimagined across forms.