Narrating Gender in Living Text Traditions: The Fluid Lives of Trans Saints

Byzantine trans saints such as Theodora/us of Alexandria and Pelagia/us of Antioch have long been understood to represent genderfluid lives. More recently, scholarship has also begun to consider the fluidity of their Lives, that is, of the texts through which these saints are mediated. Indeed, hagiographical narratives are designated as ‘living texts’ due to the remarkable mobility visible in their manuscript traditions. Moreover, metaphrasis—the Byzantine practice of reworking a narrative text into a different stylistic register or literary format—is especially evident in the tradition of saints’ legends, specifically in the influential 10th-century Menologion of Symeon Metaphrastes. Approaching scribal agency and wholesale metaphrasis as expressions of the same phenomenon—rewriting—this paper explores the challenges and opportunities in conducting gender analysis across instances of literary and linguistic refashioning. In light of the inherent entanglement of gender and language, such refashioning cannot be explained simply through the Lachmannian concept of ‘error’, nor merely as stylistic refinement, but has deeper implications. Focusing on the rewriting of trans saint legends, this paper demonstrates how Metaphrastes’ standardization of their narrative form simultaneously shuts down the rich gendered variation characterizing the text traditions of the late antique “Vorlagen”. Thus, Symeon’s act of rewriting is not just a stylistic upgrade, as it has often been characterized, but an ideological intervention: it fixes not only the text, but also the saint’s identity.