Symeon Stylites the Younger and Late Antique Antioch: From Hagiography to History is a study of the authority of the holy man and its limits in times of crisis. Lucy Parker investigates the tensions that emerged when increasingly ambitious claims about the powers of holy men came into conflict with undeniable evidence of their failures, and explores how holy men and their supporters responded to this. The work takes as its central figure Symeon Stylites the Younger (c.521-592), who, from his vantage point on a column on a mountain close to Antioch, witnessed a period of exceptional turbulence in the local area, which, in the sixth century, experienced plague, earthquakes, and Persian invasion. Through an examination of Symeon's own writings, as well as his hagiographic biography, it reveals that the stylite was a divisive figure who played upon social tensions and upon culturally sensitive areas such as paganism to carve out a role for himself as prophet and spiritual authority in the face of considerable opposition. It sets Symeon's life and cult in the context of Antioch and eastern Roman society, offering a new perspective on the state of the empire in the period before the rise of Islam. It argues that hagiography is an exceptionally rich source for the historian, offering insights into debates and tensions which reached to the heart of Christianity.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1:Antioch and Northern Syria in the Sixth Century
2:The Sermons of Symeon Stylites the Younger
3:The Life of Symeon Stylites the Younger
4:The Life of Martha
5:Hagiography and the Crises of the Sixth and Seventh Centuries

Lucy Parker completed her DPhil on Symeon Stylites the Younger at the University of Oxford in 2016. Since then she has worked as a Research Associate specialising in Syriac on the European Research Council-funded project 'Stories of Survival: Recovering the Connected Histories of Eastern Christianity in the Early Modern World' (2016-2018), as a Departmental Lecturer in Late Antique and Early Medieval History at Worcester College, Oxford (2018-2019), and, most recently, as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in Oxford working on monasteries and hagiographies in the early Islamic period (2019-).