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John of Damascus was an early eighth century theologian in the Jerusalem Patriarchate. His family supplied financial administrators in Syro-Palestine for most of the seventh century, who were involved in surrendering Damascus to the Arabs if not also to the Persians. They thrived in the sectarian environment under the Umayyads. Numerous Greek Lives paint John in legendary terms; however, these are late and unreliable. I deconstruct the Lives decoupling his timeline from Byzantine Iconoclasm, arguing that there is no evidence and good reason to think that he did not leave the Arab administration because of vexed piety, persecution or administrative language change. Rather, focusing on the chronicler's treatment of John's family, I argue that John left office for his own reasons. I propose that John was instrumental in a quid pro quo: cathedral for patriarchate negotiation. Consequently, the Arabs built the Damascus Mosque on the site of the cathedral church of St John the Baptist, and the (dyothelite) Chalcedonian party moved to Jerusalem, where they reestablished the Jerusalem Patriarchate. Thus, I argue the context of John's polemical works is Jerusalem and patriarchal policy. Further, I argue that John was commissioned to produce something like 'proto-school' texts in the context of debate in the Anastasis with internal Maronite and external West and East Syrian interlocutors. Then I look at one example of John's theological creativity to show how this context impinged on his theological program. John appropriates Maximus the Confessor's term perichoresis and reduces its scope to the Incarnation while moving it into the doctrine of God for the first time. I show that he does this for polemical reasons in order to contravene each of his interlocutors with a simple biblical rhetorical model providing Chalcedonian monks in debate with a simple formula against better educated foes. This thesis demonstrates that reading John out of context fails to appreciate his creative response to these local exigencies.

Acknowledging their powerful visual element, theological historian Bernard McGinn maintains that medieval saints’ lives are ‘something like modern film’. My thesis interrogates this assertion by bringing theoretical perspectives from twenty-first century film studies to analyse the Latin biographies of the group known as the ‘Holy Women of Liège’. Commonly (though not always accurately) considered to be ‘beguines’, these women were practitioners of a new form of female spiritual practice that emerged in the thirteenth century in the Low Countries. Practitioners of this new form of devotion typically lived unenclosed in semi-organised communities (beguinages). They embraced work in society, such as tending the sick and the poor, while simultaneously devoting themselves to God. Written shortly after the protagonists’ death by a collection of anonymous and clerical authors, the Liège vitae are filled with dramatic visions of God and intense physical unions with Christ which run alongside, and justify, tales of the women’s involvement in social, political, and religious spheres. These texts — controversial and polemical in their own time and since — demonstrate the problematic division of body and soul, Christ and human, in the period, revealing the potential of text to transmit visual experiences. Following the advice of medievalist Stephen G. Nichols, my analyses of these texts consider medieval scholarship in conversation with modern theories and questions. Recent developments in visual theory allow for fresh perspectives on the conceptualisation and function of the holy Liégeoises’ divine visions. I include chapters focusing on different strands of such theory: embodied spectatorship, the relationship of film to time and mortality, celebrity studies, and digital environments. Through theoretically informed close readings of the vitae, I argue for a spectrum of visual experience running from the medieval to the modern period, a non-hierarchical and interconnected series of possible viewing positions which inform both medieval and modern experiences.

The subject of my thesis is a little-studied hagiographical work that gives important insights into rewriting processes and their significance in medieval textual culture. The anonymous Life of Christina of Hane, a thirteenth-century Premonstratensian nun from the Palatinate, is an example of bridal mysticism which combines the medieval tradition of the reception of the Song of Songs with hagiographic elements. A codicological and palaeographical analysis of the only manuscript shows it to be a sixteenth-century copy, but the type of mysticism and the theological questions that it discusses suggest that the text was initially composed in the thirteenth century, when Christina is thought to have lived. The theological and spiritual ideas in the text belong to the wider context of communicating the transcendental within the world. My thesis uses performative language analysis to address the problems of textuality and authorization in the Life of Christina of Hane. It yields new insights into the ways in which this mystical text makes use of hagiographic strategies, how gender and vernacular theology are linked, how liturgical elements support the text’s pragmatic nature, and how somatic spirituality is reflected on an allegorical level in the embodiment of God’s bride. An assessment of three communicative aspects – medial, narrative, and allegorical – highlights the textualization of the mystical experience. The appellative structure of Christina’s text invites the reader to engage with the text. This study provides the first comprehensive interpretation of the text on Christina of Hane. It compares it to other mystical texts, to a German–Latin prayerbook, and to a fragmentary legend about Mary Magdalene. It challenges existing judgments about Christina’s biography and offers alternative solutions founded in the latest scholarship on female mystical literature.