Fractured Imperial Hagiography, John of Ephesus and Imperializing Miaphysitism

This paper will look at how John of Ephesus dialectically looks at the Empress Theodora as the pinnacle of Christendom while also seeing her as a subversive force in relation to Chalcedonian Orthodoxy. Looking at how John understands her religiously and morally in conversation with Procopius’s Anecdota, we see how hagiographies can construct and deconstruct moral identities within religious spaces. I will play these sources off each other to elucidate the hagiographic method that John applies to earthly power and further understand how people can create hagiographic identities during a person’s life. This paper will look at how the fractured nature of John’s Theodora narrative offers a different lens through which to witness hagiographic identity.