Generative Authority

Why do marginal narratives persist? How come secondary characters and their stories not only survive, but also thrive in collective memory? When primary witnesses are present, what need is there for second-hand testimonies? What keeps their presence fresh and even flourishing in popular imagination? In this project, the secondary characters are figures from early Christianity who have met one of the main apostles, and the investigation is focused on the peculiar development of the literature linked such characters in the manuscript cultures around the Mediterranean space in the medieval period. Starting from the second century, Christians kept composing for the next twelve centuries writings under the names of the apostles, or about the life and of the apostles. As such, there is a large amount of literature focused on the apostles themselves, usually labelled as apocryphal literature. This literature claims in a sense the direct authority of the apostles and has been studies extensively in the last two centuries. To the contrary, the writings studied in this project for the first time as a whole seem to claim a derivate type of authority, as they are linked not to the apostles but the characters around them. Yet this authority, secondary at it may be, proved to be generative: alongside with the apocryphal literature, there is a large literary network of writings that late-antique and medieval Christians composed, copied and translated in several languages. This is a remarkable corpus in many ways because it contains, not only letters and pious narratives of the lives, passing, miraculous deeds and occasionally visions, but also full-scale theological treatises that went on to shape monastic life and theological reasoning for centuries under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, as well as ecclesiastic canons which functioned as the body of ecclesiastic law in several language spaces under the name of Clement of Rome. The project proposes a detailed study of the paratext (titles, colophons, prefaces, marginal notes) found in manuscripts in order to better understand the development and circulation of this complex network of texts across several manuscript traditions.