Attention to hagiography has focused largely on its value for social and cultural history: the reliability of details about saints’ Lives, the relationship between texts and cults, the presence of realia embedded amidst the miraculous and counterintuitive. The hagiographical experiment, in contrast, focuses precisely on those literary qualities that the Bollandists and others had pushed aside and regarded ‘at best a pleasant diversion and at worst a sign of unreliability’ (p. 2). Developed from a conference on ‘Hagiography as Literature’ at Edinburgh in May 2015, the volume offers a collection of essays that takes the literary aspects of hagiography seriously and, in the process, offers new avenues of exploration.

The hagiographical experiment is organised into three sections, focusing on the persons, forms and strategies of hagiography respectively. The first section considers who is present in, through and around hagiography ‘as the subject(s), author, and audience’ (p. 10), with essays focusing on constructions of holiness (James Corke-Webster), the parallels between the hagiographer as an author of a ‘fictionalized account’ (p. 64) and the performative foolishness of his protagonist (Julie Van Pelt), and ambivalence about priesthood in clerical hagiography (Robert Wiśniewski). The essays in the second section stretch our understanding of the modes of hagiographic discourse by drawing attention to the satirical emulation (or even rewriting) of earlier texts (Ross Alan), the sense of ‘perpetual discourse’ (p. 159) created in composing multiple works about a saint (Zachary Yuzwa), letters as hagiographic autobiography (Michael Stuart Williams) and the intersection of hagiography with late antique habits of compilation (Todd E. French). The final section explores the strategies by which hagiographies achieve their aims, offering examples of supplication (Christa Gray), comic relief (Konstantin M. Klein) and suspended disclosure (Klazina Staat). This section closes with an extended chapter from Anne Alwis that applies the methodologies of narratology to two Byzantine texts, the metaphrasis of Tatiana of Rome (BHG 1699, seventh–ninth century) and the Life of Mary of Egypt (sixth–seventh century), a particular insight of which is her exploration of how a ‘reviser becomes an author’ (p. 302) through the constant evaluative judgements involved in elevating the register of an existing text.

These conversations are framed by an introduction and an epilogue stressing the volume's focus on hagiography as a discursive practice, both in the sense that it involved dialogue with earlier literature and in that its interpretation was inherently unstable. In their introduction, Corke-Webster and Gray outline that the volume approaches hagiography not as a clearly articulated generic form, but rather ‘a sense of family resemblances’ (p. 6), a particularly fruitful approach that expands the conversation to include forms of literature that would not as easily come to mind otherwise, such as letter collections and florilegia. The approach also addresses the contributors’ interest in engaging hagiography as an ‘ongoing process’ (emphasis original), framing their work as a ‘study of development rather than origins, and of an experiment, rather than of an established genre’ (p. 9). Lucy Grig, in her brief epilogue, reiterates the volume's focus on the discourse, debate and experimentation in the development of hagiography, deftly reminding the reader how each chapter contributes to the conversation. She also raises important questions regarding the readers of hagiography and the materiality of hagiography (for example, objects within texts, as well as manuscripts as objects).

Those working on hagiography will find much in this book to spark further exploration. Corke-Webster, for example, destabilises the position of the Vita Antonii within the origins of hagiography and its genealogical influences by casting it as a ‘literary contest’ between Athanasius and Eusebius over the constitution of the holy life, while Ross situates Jerome's Vita Pauli as a ‘polemic satire’ of the Vita Antonii (p. 124). In his delightful chapter on the Panegyricus on Macarius of Tkōou, Klein explores how the comic inversion of hagiographic tropes in the bumbling antics of one of Shenoute of Atripe's monks is used as a mirror to highlight the famous abbot's sanctity. Alwis's chapter will be of interest to those unfamiliar with narratology and provides a model for those who would like to consider how these methods might illuminate Byzantine hagiography, particularly for texts with complicated histories and a multiplicity of textual forms. Indeed, these insights are applicable to textual families beyond the hagiographies examined, for example histories and chronicles originating in the late antique period.

Perhaps the most pronounced contribution of the volume as a whole, however, is its resistance to making definitive pronouncements about either individual hagiographic texts or hagiography as a genre. Regarding the former, the editors allowed ample space for overlap between contributions, insofar as several texts receive multiple treatments (for example, the Vita Antoni or Jerome's Vita Pauli), with individual contributors placing them in conversation with different texts or applying varied methodological questions. While such divergence is often the result of an edited volume, sometimes resulting in unevenness and disjointedness, here it is an important reminder of the breadth and flexibility of hagiographic discourses. This approach enables the volume to lean into multiplicity and the dialogue between author and reader, highlighting the ways in which late antique discourse about sainthood was not a practice that evolved in a linear fashion, but was itself the product of dialogue, experimentation and even playfulness with prior models. The allowance for such a diversity also effectively challenges the still prevalent tendency to treat hagiography as a defined genre. In addition to the expected biographical vitae of saints, the reader encounters dialogues, letters and florilegia, as well as (perhaps) unexpected reliance on satire, irony and metaphrasis. Consequently, the volume encourages us to think about hagiography as a mode of discourse that crosses generic boundaries and depends on play and experimentation. And while the editors acknowledge some significant gaps in the volume's coverage – in particular, the absence of literature in Georgian, Syriac, Armenian and Arabic – it provides numerous models for the study of those texts and for analysing conversations across linguistic corpora.