saint’s life

(saint’s legend, hagiography)

   One of the most popular literary genres in medieval Europe was the saint’s life. These were short narrative biographies of holy men and women, most often martyrs, whose stories were intended to reveal the active presence of God in their lives, and therefore to inspire the reader or audience to follow the saint’s example, to persevere under adversity, or to remain steadfast in the faith. Or, on a more practical level, saints’ lives might be written to advance the reputation of the patron saint of a particular monastery, or to extol the powers of the relics of a particular saint that might be housed in a particular church or cathedral.What most interests the hagiographer (or writer of a saint’s life) are the miracles surrounding the saint that provide the irrefutable proof of the saint’s sanctity. In a way the saints’ lives were a kind of Christian ROMANCE, in which the saint, like the romance hero, accomplishes his or her quest for God’s ultimate reward against overwhelming odds in the form of worldly obstacles.

   From early medieval times, a portion of the life of a saint would be read in a church before the daily service, or during a Mass performed for the saint’s feast day (the day commemorating the saint’s death).As time went on, by the 12th century, saints’ lives became popular entertainment for pious laypersons as well.The most popular and influential collection of saints’ lives was Jacobus de Voragine’s GOLDEN LEGEND, a Latin compilation from the mid 13th century. The term legend comes from the Latin word lectio (“lesson” or “reading”), alluding to the custom of using the saint’s life as a reading in the divine office. Eventually, of course, “legend” took on the connotation of a “tall tale,” presumably because of the miraculous events depicted in the saints’ legends. But that connotation seems to have come about in postmedieval times. There is certainly no irony in the title of the most popular collection of saints’ lives in MIDDLE ENGLISH, the early 14th-century SOUTH ENGLISH LEGENDARY.

   Saints’ lives generally followed a very conventional pattern. Often they would begin with a fanciful explanation of the etymology of the saint’s name or the name of his or her birthplace. The saint would generally have gained a significant reputation for faith and goodness, even at an early age, so that he or she would have come to the attention of some powerful and corrupt figure, most commonly a pagan judge or governor. If the saint is female, it is common for the corrupt official to have lustful designs on her virtue. Brought before the official, the saint engages in a debate or argument about Christianity and paganism, in which the saint’s arguments always best the pagan official’s. The saint generally argues that the pagan’s gods are merely stone idols, that the earthly torments at the official’s disposal are as nothing compared with the eternal torments of the damned that await him, and that the pagan official has no real power except what the omnipotent grants him—in this last, particularly, the saint’s confrontation of the pagan official recalls the gospel scene of Christ before Pilate, and therefore demonstrates the saint’s emulation of Christ, a model for what the reader should do.

   Having been bested in the verbal contest, the pagan judge usually follows by unleashing torture on the saint. These torments are such that under normal circumstances, the victim would find them unbearable, but through the miraculous action of God the saints survive or even thrive under the torture. In the AELFRIC’s OLD ENGLISH Life of Saint Agatha, for example, the saint is twisted on the rack and has her breast hacked off, but God sends Saint Peter to her cell as a physician to heal her wounds. In CHAUCER’s SECOND NUN’S TALE, which is the Life of St. Cecilia, Cecilia is nearly beheaded, then boiled for three days in a cauldron, but all the while she remains perfectly comfortable and continues to preach to all who can hear her. Ultimately the saint dies, and is welcomed into paradise, but there may first be some supernatural sign that demonstrates God’s disapproval of the pagan judge’s actions. In St. Agatha’s legend, an earthquake interrupts the last torment that the governor has planned for her. Often the end of the tale includes marvelous stories of miracles wrought by the saint’s remains, or relics. St. Agatha’s tomb, for instance, saved her city from the eruption of Mount Etna. In the Golden Legend, St. Christopher’s blood brings sight to a blinded judge, who converts in response to his miraculous healing. Saints’ lives seem to have sprung ultimately from such roots as apocryphal Gospels and Acts of the Apostles, and also to some extent from classical, Oriental, Celtic, and Germanic myths that provide elements like battles with dragons (St. George) or protagonists who are 12-foot giants (St. Christopher). Some of the earliest real saint’s lives were in Eusebius of Caesarea’s fourth-century History of the Martyrs of Palestine. St. JEROME also wrote some fourth-century saints’ lives that were imitated by ISIDORE OF SEVILLE in the early seventh century. In sixth-century Gaul, GREGORY OF TOURS wrote several lives of local saints, and about the same time, Pope GREGORY THE GREAT wrote a number of lives of the saints of Italy. In the eighth century, the Venerable BEDE included the lives of a number of English and Irish saints in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People. During the Carolingian period in France, a number of earlier legends were rewritten with an eye toward improving their literary style, and hagiographic activity increased as the Middle Ages advanced. By the 13th century compilations of saints’ lives were appearing, including the Speculum historiale of Vincent of Beauvais and the Speculum sanctorale of Bernard of Gui, in addition to the hugely popular Golden Legend already mentioned.

   The widespread popularity of saints’ lives led to their imitation in other, more secular kinds of medieval literature, such as the depiction of Sir GALAHAD in The Quest of the Holy Grail and other romances, or in the creation of a kind of “secular saint” in tales of pathos like Chaucer’s CLERK’S TALE of Patient Griselda. They also served as models for later collections like John Foxe’s Book of [Protestant] Martyrs in the English Reformation. They remained popular to some extent until the 18th century, and still provide some of the earliest accounts of the biographies of some Catholic saints.

   Bibliography

   ■ Bjork, Robert E. The Old English Verse Saints’ Lives: A Study in Direct Discourse and the Iconography of Style. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985.

   ■ Jacobus de Voragine. The Golden Legend. Translated by Christopher Stace. London: Penguin, 1998.

   ■ Kitchen, John. Saints’ Lives and the Rhetoric of Gender: Male and Female in Merovingian Hagiography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

   ■ Noble, Thomas F. X., and Thomas Head, eds. Soldiers of Christ: Saints and Saints’ Lives from Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995.

   ■ Robertson, Duncan. The Medieval Saints’ Lives: Spiritual Renewal and Old French Literature. Lexington, Ky.: French Forum, 1995.

   ■ Szarmach, Paul E., ed. Holy Men and Holy Women: Old English Prose Saints’ Lives and Their Contexts. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1996.

   ■ Whatley, E. Gordon, Anne Thompson, and Robert Upchurch, eds. Saints’ Lives in Middle English Collections. Kalamazoo,Mich.: Published for TEAMS (The Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages) in association with the University of Rochester by Medieval Institute Publications, 2004.

   ■ Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn. Saints’ Lives and Women’s Literary Culture c. 1150–1300: Virginity and Its Authorizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.