From Heroes to Saints: Leucippe and Clitophon, the Lives of Galactionand Episteme, and Novel Receptions in Medieval Hagiography

This talk offers a fresh look at the long-vexed relationship between the ancient novel and Christian hagiography in order to propose a new way of understanding histories of fiction from antiquity into the medieval era. By considering how the saints’ Lives of Galaction and Episteme respond to and rework the second-century Greek novel Leucippe and Clitophon, it aims to show how these later texts make visible the tensions surrounding authority, anonymity, and literary descent implicit in this relationship and their wider repercussions for our understanding of fiction across historical and literary periodisations.