The Shape of Water: Rewriting Iconoclasm, Islam, and Deleuze in Byzantine Hagiography

This chapter has two hypotheses: I first focus on a text's vulnerability to interpretation by describing the various responses an audience might have to a saint's 'passio', focusing on the metaphrasis of Tatiana of Rome (BHG 1699). Despite the anonymous author's potential motives in composing the text, it is important to examine what various audiences may have thought or felt as they read or listened to the text over centuries. Each audience, individually or collectively, may have found their own meanings in the text; in this case, reading the 'passio' as an iconophile text, an iconoclast text, or as a response to Arab invasions. Secondly, and consequently, the chapter illustrates that in the case of rewritten texts, we do not require knowledge of the model. They possess value in their own right. Using Deleuze, I thus postulate that some rewritten texts may be termed 'simulacra'.