Stilo Texere Gesta: Jonas the Hagiographer

This chapter deals with Jonas’s hagiography from four perspectives: motivations for writing, sources, language and style, and audience. Hagiography was a way of recording sacred history and thus had a commemorative function, but it also had a programmatic intent in that it was written to provide models and inspiration for those leading religious lives. Jonas was not any different in this regard from hagiographers before him. What was different was his audience. Jonas was not writing for a small coterie of other ascetics or for one monastic community; his writings had a more public and widespread audience. He was writing for a network of monasteries and their patrons and, as such, his writings had a much more institutional function than previous Late Antique monastic hagiography.