Nana Mirashvili

This thesis consists in an edition of hagiographical legends concerning women dressed up as male anchorites, or penitent prostitutes. The critical texts have been based on the most ancient manuscripts: one of them is currently kept in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. It was written in 1030 in the Georgian Monastery of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem. The other one is the manuscript A95 of Tbilisi, which was written in Parxal (Tao Klardzeti) by the end of the Xth century. Both of these collections have been carefully compared with all of the extant Georgian copies. The French translation aims at giving an accurate picture of all the particularities of the Georgian versions. A second part of the dissertation consists in a textological study. The Georgian has been compared with the extant Greek redactions, as well as with other essential redactions, mainly Syriac and Arabic. It appears that the Greek original from which the Georgian has been translated mirrors a more ancient stage of the Greek tradition than the extant manuscripts. Certain stories such as "The Life of the Alexandrian Prostitute" have been preserved in Georgian and Syriac, whereas the Greek original is no longer extant Moreover, the Georgian bears evidence of an Arabic substrate. The edited works are the hollowing: Life and Penance of the Thais the Egyptian; Life of saint Pelagia of Antioch; Life of saint Mary the Egyptian; Life of saint Abraham and his niece Mary; Life of a Virgin who was the daughter of the Constantinopolitan prince; Life of saint Marina; Life of the prostitute of Alexandria; Life of Anastasia, the Patrician. Synoptical tables display numerous parallels between the texts. The work is completed by a full Georgian-Greek index of the texts