Life and Miracles of Thekla

Scott Fitzgerald Johnson is Dumbarton Oaks Teaching Fellow in Postclassical and Byzantine Greek in the Classics Department at Georgetown University.

A revision of Fitzgerald Johnson’s Oxford thesis, this volume contributes significantly to recent scholarship on early Christian Thekla devotion by treating the afterlife of the Acts of Thekla through the “crowning jewel of Thecla devotion in late antiquity”—the fifth-century Life and Miracles of Thekla (LM)...Throughout, Fitzgerald Johnson points us to the interplay between the anonymous author of the LM and the figure of Thekla, and, in so doing, he reminds his readers that 'text and cult mutually interacted to the point that there is no way today to separate them without doing damage to the surviving record.' In Fitzgerald Johnson’s important study, the LM provides a window onto that complex historical web of narrative production and ritual devotion.