Hagiography

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Page from the Vita Sancti Martini by Sulpicius Severus

A hagiography (

Ancient Greek ἅγιος, hagios 'holy', and -γραφία, -graphia 'writing')[1] is a biography of a saint or an ecclesiastical leader, as well as, by extension, an adulatory and idealized biography of a preacher, priest, founder, saint, monk, nun or icon in any of the world's religions.[2][3][4]
Early Christian hagiographies might consist of a biography or vita, a description of the saint's deeds or miracles (from Latin vita, life, which begins the title of most medieval biographies), an account of the saint's martyrdom (called a passio), or be a combination of these.

Christian hagiographies focus on the lives, and notably the

Taoism,[7] Islam, Sikhism and Jainism also create and maintain hagiographical texts (such as the Sikh Janamsakhis
) concerning saints, gurus and other individuals believed to be imbued with sacred power.

Hagiographic works, especially those of the Middle Ages, can incorporate a record of institutional and local history, and evidence of popular cults, customs, and traditions.[8]

However, when referring to modern, non-ecclesiastical works, the term hagiography is often used today as a pejorative reference to biographies and histories whose authors are perceived to be uncritical or excessively reverential toward their subject.

Christianity

Development

Hagiography constituted an important

early Christian church, providing some informational history along with the more inspirational stories and legends
. A hagiographic account of an individual saint could consist of a biography (vita), a description of the saint's deeds or miracles, an account of the saint's martyrdom (passio), or be a combination of these.

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

  • annual calendar catalogue, or menaion (in Greek, μηναῖον, menaion means "monthly" (adj, neut), lit. "lunar"), biographies of the saints to be read at sermons;
  • synaxarion
    ("something that collects"; Greek συναξάριον, from σύναξις, synaxis i.e. "gathering", "collection", "compilation"), or a short version of lives of the saints, arranged by dates;
  • paterikon
    ("that of the Fathers"; Greek πατερικόν; in Greek and Latin, 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 Jacobus de Voragine compiled a great deal of medieval hagiographic material, with a strong emphasis on miracle tales. Lives were often written to promote the cult of local or national states, and in particular to develop pilgrimages to visit relics. The bronze Gniezno Doors of Gniezno Cathedral in Poland are the only Romanesque doors in Europe to feature the life of a saint. The life of Saint Adalbert of Prague, who is buried in the cathedral, is shown in 18 scenes, probably based on a lost illuminated copy of one of his Lives.

The

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

Medieval England

Many of the important hagiographical texts composed in medieval England were written in the vernacular dialect

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.

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

medieval
England, hagiography became a literary genre par excellence for the teaching of a largely illiterate audience. Hagiography provided priests and theologians with classical handbooks in a form that allowed them the rhetorical tools necessary to present their faith through the example of the saints' lives.

Of all the English hagiographers no one was more prolific nor so aware of the importance of the genre as Abbot

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 harks back to some of the earliest saints of the early church.

There are two known instances where saint's lives were adapted into vernacular

Beunans Ke, about the lives of Saints Meriasek and Kea, respectively.[10]

Other examples of hagiographies from England include:

Medieval Ireland

Martyrology of Oengus
.

Ireland is notable in its rich hagiographical tradition, and for the large amount of material which was produced during the Middle Ages. Irish hagiographers wrote primarily in Latin while some of the later saint's lives were written in the hagiographer's native vernacular

Félire Óengusso
. Such hagiographical calendars were important in establishing lists of native Irish saints, in imitation of continental calendars.

Eastern Orthodoxy

St Paraskeva (Patriarchate of Peć
, 1719–20).
made in the 12th century.

In the 10th century, a

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 introduced in the Slavic world in the

Dimitry of Rostov
in 1684–1705.

The Life of Alexander Nevsky was a particularly notable hagiographic work of the era.

Today, the works in the genre of lives of the saints represent a valuable historical source and reflection of different social ideas, world outlook and

aesthetic concepts
of the past.

Oriental Orthodoxy

The

Ge'ez language are known as gadl (Saint's Life).[18] There are some 200 hagiographies about indigenous saints.[19] They are among the most important Medieval Ethiopian written sources, and some have accurate historical information.[20] They are written by the disciples of the saints. Some were written a long time after the death of a saint, but others were written not long after the saint's demise.[21][22] Fragments from an Old Nubian hagiography of Saint Michael are extant.[23]

Judaism

Jewish hagiographic writings are common in the case of Talmudic and Kabbalistic writings and later in the

Hasidic movement.[24]

Islam

Hagiography in Islam began in the

manāqib also emerged, which comprised biographies of the imams (madhāhib) who founded different schools of Islamic thought (madhhab) about shariʿa, and of Ṣūfī saints. Over time, hagiography about Ṣūfīs and their miracles came to predominate in the genre of manāqib.[25]

Likewise influenced by early Islamic research into hadiths and other biographical information about the Prophet, Persian scholars began writing Persian hagiography, again mainly of Sūfī saints, in the eleventh century CE.

The Islamicisation of the Turkish regions led to the development of Turkish biographies of saints, beginning in the 13th century CE and gaining pace around the 16th. Production remained dynamic and kept pace with scholarly developments in historical biographical writing until 1925, when Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (d. 1938) placed an interdiction on Ṣūfī brotherhoods. As Turkey relaxed legal restrictions on Islamic practice in the 1950s and the 1980s, Ṣūfīs returned to publishing hagiography, a trend which continues in the 21st century.[26]

Other groups

The pseudobiography of L. Ron Hubbard compiled by the Church of Scientology is commonly described as a heavily fictionalized hagiography.[27][28]

See also

References

  1. ^ "hagiography". Oxford English Dictionary (Online ed.). Oxford University Press. (Subscription or participating institution membership required.)
  2. .
  3. .
  4. .
  5. , pp. 120–121
  6. ^ Ælfric of Eynsham. The Lives of the Saints. Retrieved 1 December 2018.
  7. . Retrieved 23 November 2009.
  8. Anglo-Saxon Royal Houses (Continuum, 2003) p. 22
  9. ^ Stowe MS 944, British Library
  10. ^ G. Hickes, Dissertatio Epistolaris in Linguarum veterum septentrionalium thesaurus grammatico-criticus et archeologicus (Oxford 1703–05), p. 115.
  11. ^ John Leland, The Collectanea of British affairs, Volume 2. p. 408.
  12. ^ Liuzza, R. M. (2006). "The Year's Work in Old English Studies" (PDF). Old English News Letter. 39 (2). Medieval Institute, Western Michigan University: 8.
  13. S2CID 163470282
    . p. 345
  14. .
  15. .
  16. ^ Kefyalew Merahi. Saints and Monasteries in Ethiopia. 2 vols. Vol. 2, Addis Ababa: Commercial Printing Press, 2003.
  17. ^ Tamrat, Taddesse (1970). Hagiographies and the Reconstruction of Medieval Ethiopian History.
  18. ^ "Lives of Ethiopian Saints". Link Ethiopia. Archived from the original on 5 March 2017. Retrieved 4 March 2017.
  19. .
  20. .
  21. ^ "Hagiography", Jewish Virtual Library.
  22. .
  23. .
  24. .
  25. . Retrieved 8 August 2016.

Further reading

External links