The book under review is devoted to an important aspect of ancient lived religion. Healing played a major role in late antique and early Byzantine Christianity, in a broad variety of meanings. Incubation sleep was a very specific form of ancient healing: those in need of healing would go to a sanctuary (particularly those of Asclepius), sleep there after performing certain rituals and then, in their dreams, receive instructions as to how they would be healed. Important cult sites were Epidaurus and Pergamum.
Csepregi aims to examine how ancient pagan incubation practices and narratives were transformed and adapted by Christian believers and writers. She focuses in particular on the miracle collections concerning Thecla, Cosmas and Damian, Cyrus and John, and Artemius. While Thecla’s collection was compiled in the fifth century, the origins of the other three lie primarily in the seventh century. The textual history of Cosmas and Damian, in particular, is highly complex, as there are various legends linking them to competing locations, as well as overlaps with the stories of other saints (pp. 77–9).
Apart from an introduction and conclusion, the book is divided into three parts and ten chapters. The first part, ‘Cults and records’, begins by introducing the pagan Greek practice of incubation (chapter i) and discusses the transition from individual votive inscriptions and temple notes to literary collections of miracles (chapter ii). The third chapter then provides a detailed account of the aforementioned saints and their places of worship. Although the introduction to pagan incubation is very brief, many of the following chapters begin with relevant examples from and further details of pagan practices, so that the comparison with the Christian material arises organically in each case.
The second part examines the sources of the collections of miracles. First, votive inscriptions and artefacts are studied (chapter iv); next, oral traditions are considered in considerable detail (chapter v). Csepregi shows how the authors collected stories that had previously been passed on orally, and that were closely linked to a specific cult site. Finally (chapter vi), the hagiographers are discussed. In the case of Cosmas and Damian, this task is complicated by the fact that there is probably more than one hagiographer. Nevertheless, according to Csepregi, the ‘incubation hagiographer’ differs from ‘other hagiographers’ in that he experienced the elements of the incubation ritual, resulting in a ‘special attachment’ to the cult place (p. 188).
The third part, ‘Stories’, first examines the compositional structure of the collections (chapter vii) and then sheds light on the narrative techniques (chapter viii). The two final chapters offer a completely different perspective. Chapter ix discusses, on the one hand, the relationship between early Christianity and ancient medicine and, on the other hand, the various roles that actual physicians took on in Christian healing narratives. While their role is often limited to being powerless in the face of illness – thereby serving to emphasise the power of the saint and at the same time invoking an older topos of rivalry at the ‘healing market’ (p. 255) – there are also cases in which, for example, a physician acts (successfully) on behalf of a saint. Chapter x analyses how the miracle stories deal with heretics and non-Christians. In Artemius’ miracle collection, none of these appear, while some passages are clearly anti-Jewish (pp. 275ff.). Interestingly, several incubation healers suggest eating pork as a remedy (pp. 271–4). While the pagan god Asclepius proposes an alternative as soon as he observes that his Jewish patient will not eat pork, Cosmas and Damian are less willing to compromise. Cyrus and John even use a pig’s lung as a tool against a Jewish magician (pig’s lung as a remedy is already known from magical papyri; p. 274).
Csepregi concludes that it ‘is common to both pagan and Christian incubation practice that the sacred place was more important than the figure of the healer’ and that ‘both … celebrated the sacred space and the fame of the sanctuary, not so much the healer in general’ (p. 289). Given the fact that the (pagan and Christian) collections are centred around the healers, not the sites, this hypothesis is rather bold. According to Csepregi, the close linking of the ‘way of telling a cult experience … to the practice itself’ and ‘the Christian takeover of both cult and the way of recording it’ leads to the ‘incubation story-scheme’ remaining stable ‘over centuries’ (p. 292).
The question of what actually distinguishes general healer saints from incubation saints remains rather vague. This applies in particular to Thecla. After all, the focus is supposed to be on saints whose ‘modus operandi … was primarily temple sleep’ (p. 102). Although almost half of Thecla’s forty-six currently known miracles are healings, only one of them (no. 39) is clearly recognisable as an incubation – most of the other healings are clearly not incubations. Moreover, the single incubation miracle explicitly did not take place at her main sanctuary near Seleucia in Isauria but in Aigeai in (the not even neighbouring province of ) Cilicia II – as opposed to Csepregi’s claim that incubation miracles ‘are performed at one site’ (p. 48). While Csepregi states that incubation saints did not touch their patients to heal them (as opposed to Jesus: p. 53), Thecla even kicks someone’s leg to heal it (miracle no. 17).
In conclusion, this book is commendable in its comprehensive examination of Christian healer saints and the formation of miracle narrations from manifold perspectives. Again and again, Csepregi has drawn on an astonishingly wide range of literature in five different languages, which is made accessible here. She provides a multi-faceted comparison with the pagan predecessors, offering a thorough analysis of the material.
