@phdthesis{01H3VFWGFXAVQEJXJPW44AVDPV,
  abstract     = {{This dissertation focuses on the hagiographical literature devoted to the first female saint and martyr Thecla in its medieval Slavic Orthodox context. It is part of the growing scholarly interest in Saint Thecla in different languages and their corresponding manuscript traditions. The core of the dissertation concerns the Old Church Slavonic translation of the Passio Theclae or passion of Saint Thecla, also known as the originally apocryphal acts of apostle Paul and his female pupil Saint Thecla (APTh, or BHG 1710). This text was written in Greek towards the end of the second century: its popularity throughout Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages is reflected in the abundance of extant Greek manuscript copies, and the many paraphrases and additional texts based on this Passio. 
Only a selection of this corpus in Greek has been translated into Old Church Slavonic, namely the original Passio BHG 1710 and the alternative ending BHG 1713e, together with the additional miracula BHG 1718m and 1718n, in Palaeoslavic studies referred to as the Passio BHBS 1a (Ivanova 2008: 221) and its second version 1b, accompanied by the miracula BHBS 3, 0 and 2 (Ivanova 2008: 222-223). This entire hagiographical corpus dedicated to Saint Thecla has most likely been translated as a whole at the same moment in time, although this hypothesis cannot be confirmed entirely because of lacking evidence and a gaping hiatus in data from that period, that is, from 893 until 969. 
This translated Passio has been preserved in forty-eight manuscripts, dating from the eleventh until seventeenth centuries and presenting different Church Slavonic spellings. Only six copies of this text are known to the broader scholarly community through diplomatic editions, and digital reproductions are available online of an additional six manuscripts. No attempt has yet been made to provide a critical edition of this text: with this dissertation, I aim to fill this gap in the scholarly investigation of Saint Thecla. 
Although the traditional methodological approach of text criticism known as the reconstructive method has not gained full recognition in the field of Palaeoslavic studies, I present the advantages and importance of this approach with the current case study of the Passio Theclae in its first translation into Old Church Slavonic. Through this approach, I reconstruct two hyparchetypes of this text: first, the original version of this translation into Old Church Slavonic of the Passio Theclae, and, second, its redacted version, created on the basis of a new Greek exemplar. The critical edition further explores the presence of two Greek exemplars as well. Following the preferred diplomatic text-editing technique, the eight most important text witnesses on stemmatological grounds have been selected as representatives of the Slavic textual transmission and presented diplomatically in the edition. This way, the current edition offers the opportunity to explore the origins of this text and its relation to the original Greek source text material on the one hand, and to investigate the Slavic textual transmission into more detail on the other hand.}},
  author       = {{Ivanov, Amber}},
  keywords     = {{Hagiography,text criticism,Saint Thecla,Old Church Slavonic Philology}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  pages        = {{XXX, 578}},
  publisher    = {{Ghent University. Faculty of Arts and Philosophy}},
  school       = {{Ghent University}},
  title        = {{The first translation of the Passio Theclae in Old Church Slavonic : a new approach to critical text-editing in Palaeoslavic studies}},
  year         = {{2023}},
}