Thais Meretrix: A Manuscript Compilation Case Study
Come and hear about medieval manuscript culture and the story of Thais, the ‘harlot saint’
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Please come join us for this exciting guest lecture by Dr Alicia Smith. Her talk will explore how the ancient Christian story of the ‘harlot saint’ Thais, sex worker turned religious recluse, functioned in medieval culture – using the case study of a unique form of the narrative found in a complex composite manuscript, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 385. She will examine Thais’s dual identity as a stereotype of the profit-minded harlot and an embodiment of dramatic repentance, which made her story particularly malleable material in the hands of manuscript compilers both in the medieval period and later.
Alicia Smith is the current Parker Library Early-Career Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. She was previously a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto, and completed her doctorate at the University of Oxford in 2020. Her research interests focus on medieval religious life and literature, manuscript culture, and modern responses to difficult medieval stories.
Everyone is welcome!
The UiB Literature & Religion Research Group provides an inclusive forum for all levels of researchers who are working on aspects of literature and religion in a variety of institutes and departments.
