Jan Willem Drijvers Libros

This volume deals with several figures of spiritual authority in Christianity during late antiquity and the early middle ages, and seeks to illuminate the way in which the struggle for religious influence evolved with changes in church and society. A number of literary portraits are examined, portraits which, in various literary genres, are themselves designed to establish and propagate the authority of the people whose lives and activities they describe. The sequence begins with visionary and prophetic figures of the second and third centuries, proceeds through several testimonies from the fourth century to the power of holy persons, moves on to Syriac portraits of the fifth to seventh centuries, and ends with the demise of the authority of the holy man in the eighth.

This study on Flavia Julia Helena Augusta, mother of Constantine the Great, is divided into two parts. The purpose of the first part is to ascertain the facts of Helena's life on the basis of reliable historical sources. The second part deals with the legends concerning the discovery of the True Cross in Jerusalem by Helena. Fact and fiction, which are so often confused in the secondary literature, are carefully distinguished.The first part deals with subjects like Helena's life before the reign of Constantine, her residences in Trier and Rome, her conversion, her position at the court of Constantine, and her pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The second part investigates the origin, development and function of the legends of the discovery of the True Cross, which were developed in the 4th and 5th the Helena legend, the (Syriac) Protonike legend and the Judas Cyriacus legend. An appendix deals with the portraits of Helena.