Medieval Hagiography
Hagiography (Medieval). The writing of biographies of holy men and women is common to all great religions, and the aims of the biographers vary with time, place, and religion. In Christian France of the Middle Ages the purpose of vernacular hagiography was essentially the instruction and edification of a non-Latin-speaking laity. Unlike other literary genres, hagiography is definable only by its content, and to some extent by the structure of that content, not by its form. In the 11th and early 12th c. it is clearly related to chansons de geste (very early texts of the 10th c. may be so related, but evidence is lacking); from the later 12th c. onwards hagiographic texts share formal features with romance and chronicle literature, being composed first in octosyllabic couplets, then in prose, although verse no more died out in hagiography than it did in romance. From the 13th to the 16th c. saints' lives, particularly martyrs' lives, are represented in the drama.
Vernacular hagiography in medieval France is also distinct from other types of texts in being essentially a secondary literature; that is, virtually all surviving examples are translated from, or at least dependent on, Latin originals. These originals could have two purposes: to provide evidence for a canonization process or to provide readings (replacing the Epistle at Matins or during mealtimes) on the saint's feast day. In the former case rules of presentation were steadily elaborated by the Curia and became relatively fixed by the 13th c. The saint's birth and childhood were considered at least briefly as prefigurations of an adult life of sanctity; consequently contemporary literary prejudices tended to encourage borrowing from epic or romance enfances models, while social prejudices led to the hierarchical promotion of the subject, stressing the future saint's aptitude for success in the world, were his or her sights not firmly fixed on the next. A precocious aptitude for learning is common, as are other marks of piety and divine favour, extending occasionally to the performance of miracles. A spiritual crisis or conversion experience (even in the case of children born into Christian families) is frequently depicted during the subject's late teens or early twenties or at a significant ceremony (marriage or knighting), and opposition or obstacles to the career of sanctity have to be overcome. Finally, whether as martyr or confessor, the saint must imitate Christ in his death, which frequently provokes further conversions. Such imitation may be limited to the day (Friday) or hour (‘nones’—three in the afternoon) inscribed as the time of death. Although there may be some reference to miracles in biographies, these were generally, and increasingly in the 13th and 14th c., reserved for separate works (Miracula) devoted to the thaumaturgical aspects of sanctity.
As may be expected in an essentially patriarchal society one distinctinction observed between male and female saints concerns chastity. While the observance of chastity is a mark of most male saints, it does not figure as a major theme of sanctity, many male saints enjoying a normal married life, and some, including St Augustine, having illegitimate children before their conversion. Virginity and its preservation in the face of extremely aggressive persecution by male oppressors is, by contrast, a defining feature of the majority of female saints' lives. It is notable that the version of La Vie de sainte Catherine by Clemence of Barking, the only known female hagiographer of the 12th c., does not differ from other versions in this respect, but in the courtly treatment of psychology evident in the depiction of the persecuting emperor.
The earliest literary texts in French are all related to hagiography: both the Séquence de sainte Eulalie (late 9th c.) and La Vie de saint Léger (10th c.), being martyrs' lives, concentrate on the ultimate crisis; Jonas (10th c.) recasts the Old Testament story in hagiographic mould; La Vie de saint Alexis and the Occitan Chanson de sainte Foy d'Agen (both 11th c.), while having close formal links to epic, reveal already the classic disposition of the ‘chronicle’ biography. The same epico-hagiographic model was applied to the Occitan Boecis, a biography of Boethius, adapted from the De consolatione Philosophiae. Even works having a long existence in Latin prior to translation show the influence of folktale and non-Christian myth. The Oedipus myth structures both La Vie de saint Gregoire and La Vie de saint Julien l'Hospitalier, while the latter, like St Hubert, also encounters a marvellous stag which determines his ‘fate’ as a saint. Such beasts may, like their romance counterparts, be drawn from Celtic folklore. An extreme case of this tendency is Le Voyage de saint Brendan, which applies to the 6th-c. abbot of Clonfert ancient Irish ‘odyssey’ tales (immrama), notably exploiting the legend of Bran and his call beyond the sea to the Land of the Blessed by Mannanan. Such ‘artificial’ restructuring may not be absent even from the biographies of canonized personalities from the comparatively recent past of the hagiographer. Thus, Matthew Paris's Vie de seint Ædward le rei, like its Latin sources (lives by Osbert of Clare and Aelred of Riveaulx), creates for Edward the Confessor a character and career deliberately constructed to conform to hagiographic models, with Earl Godwin cast as a Judas figure. The new biography, whose bias is created from an inextricable mixture of political and ecclesiastical motivations, is quite at variance with what is known from other sources.
Where a biblical personality like John the Baptist is involved, hagiographers were generally more scrupulous in following the Gospels, or at least the apocrypha. Even so, the 12th-c. fragment of John's Life in alexandrine couplets adheres to established patterns by having him learn his letters before the age of 5, at which point, fleeing the temptations presented by his playmates, he adopts the eremitical life described in the Bible. For its part the 14th-c. Vie de saint Jean-Baptiste pads out the few received details with didactic digressions and replaces the enfances section with a lengthy account of the invention of the saint's relics. Even in the case of a recently dead figure like St Thomas Becket, where the author of the vernacular Life, Guernes de Pont Sainte-Maxence, consulted eyewitnesses and used chancery documents, the exploitation of Latin Vitae, which imposed received models, applies. Thus Becket's early piety and scholastic aptitude are stressed, and it becomes impossible to tell whether his widely reported crisis of conscience and conversion to extreme asceticism on being appointed archbishop of Canterbury is a reality, a conventional motif, or a case of life imitating art. At one extreme of hagiography lies Joinville's La Vie de saint Louis, which centres on his recollections of Louis IX's crusading expedition to Damietta, on which the author was a close companion of the king. The framework of traditional hagiography is broken in this personal memoir. At the other extreme are found accounts of fictitious or legendary ( Guillaume d'Angleterre, Ami et Amile, Berthe au Grand Pied) or fictionalized (Godefroi de Bouillon, first crusader king of Jerusalem) heroes and heroines borrowed from other genres, whose biographies were adapted to hagiographic norms, without the original epic or romance features being suppressed. [See also Anglo-Norman Literature, 6a; Bollandistes.]
[Philip Bennett]
Bibliography
- H. Delehaye, The Legends of the Saints, trans. D. Attwater (1962).
- P. Johnson and B. Cazelles, Le Vain Siècle guerpir (1979)
- B. Cazelles, Le Corps de sainteté (1982)
