The stories known as “edifying tales" are a type of monastic fiction that arose in the 4th century and continued to grow into the 7th century, scattered across dozens of anonymous manuscript collections. The genre enjoyed a second flowering in the 10th century, this time as the work of a named author, before disappearing altogether. Collectively, this body of material runs to many hundreds of narratives—some of which survive only in Georgian, Armenian, Syriac, Latin, and Slavonic translations—and yet it has never been studied as an historical and literary genre in its own right. Moreover, what strikes the modern reader is just how little is actually “edifying” in many of these tales. What they demonstrate is that Byzantine readers enjoyed a boldly twisting plot conveyed in formats that resemble thrillers, or even the signature stories of O. Henry, with their surprise endings.
Sergey Ivanov (PhD Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow) is a specialist in the history and culture of Byzantium and in Byzantino–Slavic relations. He has published more than two hundred scholarly articles and several books, including In Search of Constantinople: A Guidebook through Byzantine Istanbul and Its Surroundings (Istanbul, 2022, translated into Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian and Turkish), Pearls Before Swine: Missionary Work in Byzantium (Paris, 2015, translated into Russian, Czech and Serbian), and Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond (Oxford, 2006, translated into Russian, Serbian, Czech and Romanian).
