Author Description

"Dozens of holy names appeared on a map since people started caring about saints and their cults in late antiquity until the high Middle Ages. Some had long-lasting and significant cults that transpired cultures, languages, and continents. Others did not. When a need appeared to organize saints in a systematic order as their numbers grew, more prominent saints tended to force out "less known" saints. What has happened, due to this, with the hagiographies of those "lesser" saints? What has happened with their cults? This book discusses a "lesser" saint, Irenaeus, who suffered martyrdom in 304 CE in Sirmium, Pannonia. His short-lived late antique cult in Sirmium, the unstable feast day in calendars, and an anonymous text about his martyrdom, translated into five languages (Latin, Greek, Old Slavonic, Georgian, and Armenian), did not help maintain his memory. The saint was eventually abandoned in the Middle Ages, yet, in some parts of Christendom faster than in others. The book examines the mechanisms of saintly memory and forgetting and demonstrates that the unsynchronized links among cults, calendars, and texts about saints lead to their suppression and forgetting; from "lesser," saints ultimately become "forgotten." The book is primarily intended for academic audiences and specialists in medieval hagiography, literature, and history, for scholars of the Western Middle Ages, Byzantium, and the Slavic world, as well as general readers attentive to the phenomenon of sainthood and martyrdom, particularly in specific medieval contexts"--