Posted by David Michelson on Tuesday, October 4, 2016 in Publications.

Syriaca.org is pleased to announce the release of a new online publication:

Bibliotheca Hagiographica Syriaca Electronica

Photo Credit: DFM 13, f. 61r, from Dominican Friars of Mosul MS 13 (1723 CE). Image provided by Hill Museum & Manuscript Library, Saint John’s University, Collegeville, Minnesota under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Editors:
Jeanne-Nicole Mellon Saint-Laurent, Marquette University
David A. Michelson, Vanderbilt University
P. Ugo Zanetti, Monastère de Chevetogne
Claude Detienne, Pontificia Universidade Catolica de Goias

The Bibliotheca Hagiographica Syriaca Electronica (BHSE) is a guide to over one thousand Syriac stories, hymns, and homilies on Christian saints. These texts blossomed alongside the cult of the saints in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. While traditions in Greek and Latin are well known to scholars, the stories of the saints of the Middle East are only just being discovered. The BHSE makes Syriac hagiography available to scholars and the wider public, with information about these texts including: authors, opening and closing lines, manuscripts, translations, and bibliography. The BHSE is the result of a partnership between Syriaca.org and the Jesuit scholarly society, La société des Bollandistes. The BHSE combines digital scholarship with the methods for the study of hagiography developed by the Bollandists since 1643.

The BHSE is freely available online as the first volume of The New Handbook of Syriac Literature. Readers can browse entries online, download the entire publication in TEI XML, create permanent links to other digital publications, and offer editorial revisions through The Gateway to the Syriac Saints: http://syriaca.org/saints

“An indispensable free resource for anyone interested in Christian martyrs, saints, biblical figures, and monastics at the crossroads of major empires. Multilingual and multipurpose in design, with a window on the diversity of Christianity in the Middle East and a springboard for original research.” —Georgia Frank, Colgate University

An informational flyer about BHSE may be downloaded here: Bibliotheca Hagiographica Syriaca Electronica Flyer 2016