hagiography

[hag-ee-og-ruh-fee, hey-jee-]

Literature describing the lives of the saints. Christian hagiography includes stories of saintly monks, bishops, princes, and virgins, with accounts of their martyrdom and of the miracles connected with their relics, tombs, icons, or statues. Written as early as the 2nd century and popular during the Middle Ages, hagiographies focus on lives of individual saints or on stories of a class of saints (e.g., martyrs).

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Encyclopedia Britannica, 2008. Encyclopedia Britannica Online.

Hagiography

Hagiography is the study of saints. A hagiography, from Greek (h)ağios (ἅγιος, "holy" or "saint") and graphē (γραφή, "writing"), refers literally to writings on the subject of such holy people, and specifically the biographies of ecclesiastical and secular leaders. The term hagiology, the study of hagiography, is also current in English, though less common. (This in fact follows original Greek practice, where ἁγιογραφία refers to visual images of the saints, while their written lives (βίοι or vitæ) or the study thereof are known as ἁγιολογία.)

Though Christian hagiographies focus on the lives, and notably the miracles of men and women canonized by the Christian Church, other religions such as Buddhism and Islam also create and maintain hagiographical texts concerning saints and other individuals believed to be imbued with the sacred.

The term "hagiographic" has also come to be used as a pejorative reference to the works of those contemporary biographers and historians whom critics perceive to be uncritical and even "reverential" in their writing.

Development of hagiography

Hagiography constituted an important literary genre in the early Christian church, providing some informational history with the more important inspirational stories and legend. A hagiographic account of an individual saint can constitute a vita or brief biography, an acta or account of the deeds of the individual, or it may be condensed into a passio, concentrating on the saint's martyrdom.

The genre of lives of the saints first came into being in the Roman Empire as legends about Christian martyrs and were called martyrologies. In the 4th century, there were three main types of catalogs of lives of the saints:

annual calendar catalogue, or menaion (in Greek, menaios means "month") (biographies of the saints to be read at sermons);
synaxarion, or a short version of lives of the saints, arranged by dates;
paterikon (in Greek, pater means "father"), or biography of the specific saints, chosen by the catalog compiler.

In Western Europe hagiography was one of the more important vehicles for the study of inspirational history during the Middle Ages. The Golden Legend of Jacob de Voragine compiled a great deal of mediæval hagiographic material, with a strong emphasis on miracle tales.

The Bollandist Society continues the study, academic assembly, appraisal and publication of materials relating to the lives of Christian saints. (See Acta Sanctorum.)

Hagiography of the mediæval period in England

With the introduction of Latin literature into England in the 7th and 8th centuries the genre of the life of the saint grew increasingly popular. It is not surprising that such a genre would become popular in England. When one contrasts it to the popular heroic poem, such as “Beowulf,” one finds that they share certain common features. In “Beowulf,” the titular character battles against Grendel and his mother, while the saint, such as Athanasius’ Anthony (one of the original sources for the hagiographic motif) or the character of Guthlac, battles against figures no less substantial in a spiritual sense. Both genres then focus on the hero-warrior figure, but with the distinction that the saint is of a spiritual sort.

In Anglo-Saxon and mediæval England, Hagiography became a literary genre par excellence for the teaching of a largely illiterate audience. Hagiography provided priests and theologians with the classical handbooks in a form that allowed them the rhetorical tools necessary to defend the truth of their scriptures.

Of all the English hagiographers no one was more prolific nor so aware of the importance of the genre as Abbot Ælfric of Eynsham. His work The Lives of the Saints (MS Cotton Julius E.7) comprises a set of sermons on saints' days, formerly observed by the English Church. The text comprises two prefaces, one in Latin and one in Old English, and 39 lives beginning on December 25 with the nativity of Christ and ending with three texts to which no saints' days are attached. The text spans the entire year and describes the lives of many saints, both English and continental, and hearkens back to some of the earliest saints of the early church.

Imitation of the life of Christ then was the benchmark against which saints were measured, and imitation of the lives of saints was the benchmark against which the general population measured itself.

Hagiography of the mediæval period in Ireland

Ireland is notable and its rich hagiographical tradition, and for the large amount of material which was produced during the mediæval period. Irish hagiographers wrote primarily in Latin while some of the later saint's lives were written in the hagiographer's native vernacular Irish. Of particular note are the lives of St. Patrick, St. Columba and St. Brigit—Ireland's three patron saints.

Hagiography in Eastern Orthodoxy

In the 10th century, a Byzantine monk Simeon Metaphrastes was the first one to change the genre of lives of the saints into something different, giving it a moralizing and panegyrical character. His catalog of lives of the saints became the standard for all of the Western and Eastern hagiographers, who would create relative biographies and images of the ideal saints by gradually departing from the real facts of their lives. Over the years, the genre of lives of the saints had absorbed a number of narrative plots and poetic images (often, of pre-Christian origin, such as dragon fighting etc.), mediaeval parables, short stories and anecdotes.

The genre of lives of the saints was brought to Kievan Rus' by the South Slavs together with writing and also in translations from the Greek language. In the 11th century, the Rus' began to compile the original life stories of the first Rus'ian saints, e.g. Boris and Gleb, Theodosius Pechersky etc. In the 16th century, Metropolitan Macarius expanded the list of the Rus'ian saints and supervised the compiling process of their life stories. They would all be compiled in the so called Velikiye chet’yi-minei catalog (Великие Четьи-Минеи, or Grand monthly readings), consisting of 12 volumes in accordance with each month of the year. They were revised and expanded by St. Dimitry of Rostov in 1684-1705.

The genre of lives of the saints was often used as ecclesiastic and political propaganda. Today, the works in this genre represent a valuable historical source and reflection of different social ideas, world outlook and aesthetic concepts of the past.

Secular usage

The term "hagiography" has come to refer to the works of contemporary biographers and historians whom critics perceive to be uncritical and even "reverential." For example, critics of historian (and John F. Kennedy associate) Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. often call him a "Kennedy hagiographer."

Aleister Crowley's autobiography, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, is subtitled An Autohagiography.

Bibliography

André Vauchez, La sainteté en Occident aux derniers siècles du Moyen Âge (1198-1431), Rome, 1981 (BEFAR, 241) [Engl. transl. : Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, Cambridge, 1987 and Ital. transl. : La santità nel Medioevo, Bologne, 1989].