HAGIOGRAPHY AND THE RECONSTRUCTION OF LOCAL RELIGION IN LATE ANTIQUE EGYPT: MEMORIES, INVENTIONS, AND LANDSCAPES* David Frankfurter Abstract Scholars interested in the continuing vitality or decline of traditional religion in the late antique Mediterranean world often find themselves dependent on hagiographical texts, which inevitably depict traditional heathenism as a foil to their Christian heroes and thus cannot be used as simple documentation for historical realia. This paper proposes ways of drawing historical evidence for real, continuing local religion from hagiographical texts from late antique Egypt. After a discussion of the specific ways in which hagiography imposes literary and biblical themes on its representation of traditional religious prac- tices, two points of authentic memory are presented: topographical traditions and traditions about expressive gesture. In contrast, the hagiographical image of the Egyptian priest, for example, carries little historical authenticity. A con- cluding section of the paper defends and outlines the use of anthropological models for the historical interpretation of hagiography. Introduction What good are saints’ lives for history? The question comes up repeatedly in the study of Late Antiquity, but the answers have long devolved into two diametrically opposite camps. On the one hand, there are those historians who draw on hagiography as virtual docu- mentation of ancient attitudes and events — and certainly much more fun to read than chronicles and papyri. The field of Byzantine Studies has often seemed particularly indulgent of this naive posi- tivism. 1 On the other hand, there are historians who, confronted by the literary and stereotyped nature of saints’ legends, find themselves incapable of using the texts in any productive way for social history. * I am grateful to the conveners, Jitse Dijkstra and Mathilde van Dijk, for invit- ing me for the lecture in Groningen and creating a stimulating forum for its dis- cussion, and to my respondents, Jacques van der Vliet and Peter van Minnen, for their provocative comments. 1 See, for example, Stavroula Constantinou, review of Carolyn L. Connor, Women of Byzantium (New Haven, 2004), Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2005.01.07. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2006 chrc 86, 1-4 CHRC86_F2_12-37 7/17/06 8:43 PM Page 13