A Symposium on Syriac Hagiography
Milwaukee, Wisconsin was the meeting place for scholars of Syriac hagiography for three days. From April 10 to 12, the Symposium on Syriac Saints: Lives, Commemoration, Memory was held on the campus of Marquette University. The symposium, organized within the framework of the MSCA project ForM Forged Memory, was attended by approximately 20 speakers from the United States and Europe, who discussed a variety of topics centered on the common focus: Syriac Saints. The symposium organizers were Dr. Annunziata Di Rienzo (Marie Curie Post-Doctoral Fellow) and Prof. Jeanne-Nicole Mellon Saint-Laurent (faculty at Marquette University)
The organizers shared the intent to organize a symposium to discuss the state of the art of studies on Syriac hagiography and Syriac saints. The symposium was meant to be open to scholars at various stages of their academic careers.
The papers presented at the symposium covered an extraordinary range of facets and topics related to saints and hagiography: from history to theology, from philology to literary analysis, from translation techniques to the study of manuscripts, from archaeology to digital projects, also touching on the analysis of social and ecclesiological dynamics.
Indeed, the breadth of the topics and approaches was not limited to the fields; it was also geographical (Daniel Sheridan presented a paper on a Syriac Saint in China) and chronological (Nicolas Atas’ paper was an introduction to hagiography in Turoyo).
To crown an already rich and varied program, the conference hosted three keynote speakers, who not only represented excellence in the field but also represented three different approaches, perspectives, and fields within Syriac studies. Prof. Dina Boero (Institute for Advanced Study) presented the archaeological evidence attesting to the pilgrimages to Saint Simeon the Stylite’s shrine (Qal‘at Sim‘ān) to show how the site’s central architectural elements can help us understand the forms of pilgrimage there. Prof. Susan Harvey (Brown University) focused on the “agency of listening,” arguing that among late antique Syriac Christians, the liturgical listener exercised considerable agency in determining a saint’s story. Prof. Alberto Camplani (La Sapienza, Rome) showed how to apply the concept of geo-ecclesiology to Syriac hagiographic works related to some patriarchs of Alexandria.
Conference Program HERE