If incubation is simply ritualized dreaming in a sanctified space, then it is probably best to think about it in terms of the religious utility of dreaming in general. The practice gained institutional renown in ancient Greece and then reappeared in multiple Christian saints’ shrines around the fifth century CE. But a lively debate has unfolded in recent years over whether Christian incubation was a “pagan survival,” or an entirely new Christian concept within the cult of the saints, or an autochthonous tradition that developed in particular (and primarily Eastern) regional Christianities.
Ildikó Csepregi’s monograph makes a strong case for reading Christian incubation as part of a broader ancient tradition: the continuity of a “practice” rather than an institutional ceremony revolving around the supplicant’s dream of a healer-figure in a particular holy site. In many cases, there is compelling evidence that the incubation practices of particular locales were indeed revitalized in Christian form. Indeed, Csepregi argues, while the sites and practices of incubation tended to be highly locative, the stories and characters of the Christian saints themselves (principally Ss Thecla, Cosmas and Damian, Cyrus and John, and Artemios) were vague and mutable, with fluid appearances, allowing them to appear in multiple guises. Christianization certainly brought distinctive features, but a broader culture of incubation prevailed from well before Christianization; and this continuity is too obvious to deny.
Csepregi focuses especially on the miracle collections and their manuscripts, which arose out of and lent authority to the shrines and the people and animals who gathered there. Chapter 1 introduces both the incubation traditions of the Greco-Roman Asclepius cults and the receptivity that Christian authorities would have had toward dream-based healing, given dream traditions in Greek medical tradition and Jewish tradition as well. She notes that, while there is little incontrovertible evidence for the direct Christian appropriation of prior incubation cults, incubation traditions did proliferate in particular regions where prior cults had been active.
Chapter 2 introduces the corpus of the miracle collections, which by the seventh century had become more popular than saints’ lives. Csepregi reads Christian incubation miracle collections in the context of pre-Christian incubation records. They respond to the same cultic realities as the Asclepian Iamata (dreaming in a specific place), and they diverge entirely in narrative structure and sense of the miraculous from typical Christian hagiography. Although the collections drew on Christian scripture in composing miracle stories, they did so loosely, not relying on gospel lore to construct narratives. Ultimately, the collections sought to establish the shrine as the place where the saint was active and available through dreams.
Chapter 3 reviews the literary and historical evidence for the major incubation cults and their possible relationships to predecessors. (Those of Thecla in Cilicia and John and Cyrus in Menouthis both succeeded or functioned concurrently with non-Christian cults.) Constantinople had at least two: Cosmas and Damian, and Artemios. Csepregi mentions a number of other incubation shrines without such rich collections (Apa Mena in Egypt and several to the Archangel Michael).
These miracle collections illustrate how incubation drew upon and inspired a veritable culture of the senses, of things, and of storytelling, and Csepregi lays out this culture in chapters 4 and 5, both invaluable contributions to the cult of saints in late antiquity. Chapter 4, “Material Sources,” inquires how dreams might be informed through immediate sensory realities (like shrine iconography) and might in turn inform the commissioning or depositing of votive objects. While the saints’ dream-forms could be ambiguous, the souvenir eulogia offered by the shrine usually bore a standard iconography. Saintly presence, it seems, arose in the interstices between dream-epiphany and official iconography.
Chapter 5 makes an argument for a culture of oral tradition around incubation shrines, where people shared and developed their and others’ stories before they were collected in literary works (as has been shown for the miracles behind the Epidaurian Iamata). Csepregi contextualizes this oral culture in particular moments of sharing, like night-vigils, and the influences of local tradents.
Chapters 6–8 cover literary features of the miracle collections. Chapter 6 looks at how stories were shaped between the original patient and the author, who constructs himself as both dream-recipient and witness. Chapter 7 examines “compositional structures” in the narration of miracles and the alternation of credible story contexts and incredible events. Chapter 8 analyzes the role of the dream itself in the collections: the obscurity of the dream-narrative, the instructions given by the saint, and the narrative sequences following dreams (like the pursuit of healing substances). Dreams might also come to others – attendants, proxies – or to afflicted people far from the shrine itself, inviting them to the shrine. Csepregi points out that these “invitational” dreams do not reflect a pan-local or transcendent saint but rather the extension of the saint’s efforts to bring people into the precise spatial orbit where oneiric healing should take place.
Chapters 9 and 10 place the characters of the collections into social and historical context. For example (chapter 9), the saints’ oneiric healing gestures and remedies, some quite odd, reflect actual medical practices of the time. As for the authors’ often derogatory remarks about local doctors who had failed their patients before healing at the shrine, these reflect the typical rivalry among medical professions evident in other sources, not a Christian antipathy to medical practice. Stock opponents like heathens, Jews, and heretics (chapter 10) were clearly familiar parts of the culture, even if fictional (and this would include non-Christian Hellenes, even in the sixth century). Their entertainment value Csepregi regards as a sort of “theological grotesque” (287).
A brief and efficient conclusion rounds out the work. The central feature of the Christian incubation shrine – what justifies its interpretation in the context of pre-Christian incubation traditions – was the site itself rather than some distinctive character of the saint; and dreams, ritually accessed in the shrine, were the unique means to gain resolution of one’s affliction. Incubation in Early Byzantium is a successful, engagingly written, and thought-provoking contribution to both the history of religions and the understanding of a particular (and quite popular) type of Christian literature from the early Byzantine period, the curated collection of incubation miracles.
