The 2019 Spring Symposium for the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies was held at Churchill College, Cambridge from 30 March through 1 April 2019. In addition to acting as the conference webmaster, I gave a communication titled ‘“It devoured many people and made bitter havoc among men”: stories of violence in the late antique wilderness.’ The abstract reads:
This communication will explore predatory dangers for travel through, or even just living in, ‘wilderness,’ particularly how it is depicted in late antique hagiographic literature. Hagiography provides particularly fertile ground on account of its spiritual-realist setting, necessitating the blending of literary expectations with lived experiences. A lengthy Syriac Life of St. Simeon Stylites likely dates to shortly after the saint’s death in AD 459. The text situates Simeon’s life, miracles, and death in a detailed spiritual-realist reflection of fifth-century northern Syria, in and around the site of Qalʿat Simʿān. Among its miracle stories, two vignettes stand out not just for their violence but the nature of it: a lion on Black Mountain who devours people, and a pack of unspecified creatures who ravaged Mount Lebanon. Both passages revel in the bloody, gory details of predators rampaging through men and livestock until the saint’s intervention reverses fortunes and allows men to slay these tormentors. These passages raise several questions: is this principally a literary construct or a case where art closely reflects lived experience? How far removed were authors and audiences from these dangers? Where do depictions of the violent dangers of the wilderness fit into contemporary tropes about the relationship between man and nature? Is there a fundamental tension between anxiety over the threat which predators pose to people and livestock, and the triumphant assertion of order when men slay them? Is the blood and violence more than exciting dressing for a parable about the triumph of divine order over natural chaos?
Starting with hagiographic literature, this paper will explore negative tropes about wilderness which resonate elsewhere in contemporary literature and art. It will concentrate on the potentially violent perils which people faced when they encountered the wild. By focusing on stories about the bloody interaction between humans and wild predators, we gain insight into the real and imagined anxieties which late antique people felt about the wild and their relationship with it.
May 7th, 2019 by DC Whalin