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				 One of the chief characteristics of Byzantine culture in the early Middle Age was the willingness to engage in sometimes fierce debates. The best known of these debates, the controversy about the veneration of images, has been studied by many scholars and is now well known. The same cannot be said about another contentious issue, the question of whether the time of one’s death was fixed from eternity or whether it could be changed. In the late 1970s Leendert Gerrit Westerink and Giuseppe Zanetto published critical editions of two major contributions to the debate, a disputation by Theophylact Simocatta and a dialogue by Patriarch Germanus of Constantinople. Yet this did not lead to sustained engagement with the texts. The only discussion is found in Wolfgang Lackner’s edition of a much later treatise by Nicephorus Blemmydes. In the introduction to his edition Lackner identified numerous relevant primary sources dating to the fourth to twelfth centuries, proposed a rough classification and discussed some of the arguments used by the authors. What is still missing is a reconstruction of the historical context of the debate. The present article seeks to fill this gap. It considers not only treatises about the term of life but also Biblical commentaries, homilies, hymns, letters and saints’ lives that can throw light on the debate.

Affirming Divine Providence and Limiting the Powers of Saints: the Byzantine Debate about the Term of Life (6th-11th Centuries)