Between history and hagiography: Eadmer of Canterbury's vision of the Historia novorum in Anglia

Written between c.1093 and the end of the 1120s, Eadmer of Canterbury's Historia novorum in Anglia is one of the best-known sources for the study of Anglo-Norman political, ecclesiastical and cultural history. This article explores the identity of the text as it developed in Eadmer's own mind. While modern scholars have placed the Historia novorum within the development of English national historiography, Eadmer showed no desire for his work to be received in this way. Instead, Eadmer's Historia was profoundly influenced by his extensive experience in writing the lives and miracles of saints. The Historia novorum occupies a space between history and hagiography, which successfully redeployed Eadmer's experiences of writing the past through hagiography, in order to produce an innovative and unique example of the genre of medieval historiography.     

Autobiography and Hagiography in Byzantium

This article explores the interaction between hagiography and autobiography in Byzantine literature. As the most productive narrative genre, hagiography influenced the structure and content of autobiographical accounts. On the other hand, for some vitae the protagonist's autobiographical account constituted the primary written source. A hagiographical work, again, may have a highly autobiographical character insofar as the author refers to himself as the saint's associate who eye-witnessed the saint's exploits. In many cases the hagiograph's autobiographical remarks are sprinkled over the whole narrative. Other authors present the life, or part of it, in a separate section, located usually toward the end of the text. The present study also points to common features in hagiographical autobiography and other forms of autobiographical writing, that constitute the conventions of a standardized way of written self-representation in Byzantium.     

Rewriting the founder: Werden on the Ruhr and the uses of hagiography

The rich hagiographical corpus, charters and privileges of the monastery of Werden on the Ruhr allow unparalleled access to its ninth-century history. This article focuses upon three ninth-century vitae of its founding saint which delineate both the transformations which Werden underwent in the course of the century and the ways in which the monastery attempted to respond and adapt to these changes. In so doing, it illuminates the role that saintly relics and hagiography could play in the formation of Christian communities both within and beyond cloister walls.     

‘From Nitria to Sitria’: the construction of Peter Damian's Vita Beati Romualdi

This article examines the construction of Peter Damian's (c.1007–72) Vita Beati Romualdi (c.1042) as a piece of eleventh-century hagiography. Peter Damian was an erudite hermit, monk and reformer whose ideas on spiritual perfection helped to shape the ideals of the so-called ‘Gregorian Reform’ movement in the eleventh century. This article aims to contribute to recent historiography on the eleventh century through a re-examination of this important piece of hagiography, which has not been more thoroughly considered by medievalists since 1957 in Tabacco's critical edition. This article suggests that, through the biography of St Romuald, Peter Damian sought to promote the example of the Desert Fathers in formulating a more rigorous monastic rule, not only for his hermits at Fonte Avellana, but also for a wide monastic and lay audience. It also argues that there existed a gradual evolution in monastic ideology from the tenth century onwards, sponsored by ascetics like Damian who strove constantly to lead a more austere existence based on the Desert tradition and more particularly the Life of St Antony. In particular, the article pays attention to how Damian, as a hagiographer, was engaged in the construction of Romuald's sanctity.     

Gender and Sanctity in the Middle Ages

This review essay examines recent trends and developments in the study of medieval sanctity and gender, looking at the range of approaches which have been and are being taken by both historians and literary scholars to a wide variety of hagiographic texts. Two recent studies of medieval hagiography are reviewed, John Kitchen, Saints' Lives and the Rhetoric of Gender: Male and Female in Merovingian Hagiography and the collection Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters edited by Catherine Mooney. These works are representative of differing approaches to the issue of male authors' representations of female sanctity and concomitant issues of gender ideology.     

Dragons,saints and wells

Stories of conflict between saints and dragons flourished between the eighth and fourteenth centuries at the disputed boundary zone between folktale and hagiography. The presence of dragons at wells was an accepted image in vernacular culture, independently adopted by successive writers of saints' Lives to enliven stories about the spiritual power of their heroes and the pastoral and missionary work they performed. In the transition of hagiography from its Middle Eastern origins the dragon, originally a plausible desert snake, took on mythical status and became identified with social evils from paganism to corruption. Christian imagery of baptism involved a symbolic contrast of lethal and healing waters, given visual expression in the sculptural motif of a dragon encircling the font. But the story of the dragon-fight could carry multiple meanings. Earlier texts reflect a world in which clerical culture had to make headway against lay power, and the dragon is something to be banished, like the aggressive chieftains faced down by saints. Later on Christianity was presented as part of a harmonious social order, and the dragon is crushed by the pious force of chivalry.     

The Vita Gregorii and Ethnogenesis in Anglo-Saxon Britain

Abstract

'The Vita Gregorii and Ethnogenesis in Anglo-Saxon Britain'. During the Migration Period, ethnic and political identities emerged amongst the barbarians in the West. In Britain, the barbarian newcomers came to see themselves as a single gens — the English people. Although this has usually been seen as a smooth and almost inevitable process of ethnogenesis, an analysis of an oft overlooked hagiography, the Vita Gregorii, will demonstrate that ideas of ethnicity carried political currency, at least in early-eighth-century Northumbria. Moreover, the notion that all the barbarian newcomers belonged to a single gens found dissenters, evidenced in part by the Vita Wilfridi, which regarded a local, Northumbrian identity as primary. This interpretation places the Anglo-Saxons alongside their Continental counterparts, allowing events in Britain to be understood in a manner harmonious with the broader experiences of the West.     

‘The face of the one who is making for Jerusalem’: The Angel Choir of Lincoln Cathedral and Joy1

This paper examines the Angel Choir of Lincoln Cathedral (c. 1256–80) from the perspective of two interrelated concepts: the heavenly Jerusalem and joy. Building on previous scholarly discussions of the choir’s unusual creativity and profusion of organic and iconographic decoration, it traces connections between the choir and the rich corpus of writing on the joys of the heavenly Jerusalem. In juxtaposition with the hagiography of St Hugh, this opens a valuable seam of meaning and offers a possible explanation for the choir’s decorative intensity. It also reveals a number of ways, previously unnoted, in which Hugh of Avalon and his spirituality are recalled by the choir built to house his relics.     

Margherita of Cortona: Women,Preaching, and the Writing of Hagiography

Abstract

This article examines Margherita of Cortona (1247–97), who took a penitent habit in the late 1270s. In 1290 Margherita was granted permission to rebuild the church of San Basilio near her cell and a secular priest became her confessor. After her death in 1297, her former confessor, the Franciscan Giunta Bevegnati, composed Margherita's Legenda, which provides an account of her life, conversion and penitence, her conversations with Christ, and her charitable works. In addition to the Legenda, there is also an altarpiece, portraying Margherita and scenes from her life, and the seventeenth-century watercolour paintings that reproduce the frescos which once decorated the church of Santa Margherita, the former San Basilio. Following a short introduction to Margherita's life, and a brief examination of preaching for women in the Middle Ages and its prohibitions, the article examines how the biographer, Giunta Bevegnati, represents the relationship of Margherita to preaching and sermons, in particular focusing on passages in Margherita's Legenda, where her efficacious speech or performance has a clear impact on an audience and her biographer does not use the term 'preach' for her utterances. Finally, the extent to which Margherita's biographer uses hagiography for homiletic purposes is discussed.     

Towards Post-Soviet Pre-Modernism: on recent approaches to early Rus(s)ian hagiography

Abstract

The appearance of Paul Hollingsworth's book of translations, The Hagiography of Kievan Rus' (Hollingsworth 1992), provides the pretext for this survey. Tales of saints, or of candidates for sainthood, constitute a substantial proportion of the extant native literature of pre-Mongol Rus, comparable in volume only with the chronicles. This in itself has ensured that the study of hagiography has had a prominent place in the study of early Rus literature and culture, and hence in the wider field of byzantinorussica. In recent years native saints have benefited additionally from changes in the cultural and political climate: the advent of glasnost (from 1985), one of whose main themes was the recovery of the past; the millennium of the Conversion of the Rus, whose celebration in 1988 became a test and a manifestation of glasnost; and eventually, at the end of 1991, the collapse of the USSR and the sharpening of competition between national mythologies (competition for the same cultural space) both within and between the newly independent East Slav states of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. The surge of ‘native’ interest has been matched, only in part fortuitously, by an increase in western publications.     

Fashioning a Cacique Nun: From Saints’ Lives to Indian Lives in the Spanish Americas

New Spain was a land of opportunity for the missionary as well as the conquistador. The controversial proposal to found a convent for women of the indigenous elite illuminates the redefinition of notions of gender and race. Examining testimonies on this question written by priests, this article charts how they transform material that would normally have been presented as hagiography into narratives of a more general nature, and argues that this rhetorical shift contributed to a kind of writing on the Indies which not only shared the comparative and epistemological stakes of ethnography but also considered issues of gender.     

Roman soil and Roman sound in Irish hagiography

ABSTRACT

Irish hagiography displays considerable interest in communication between Ireland and Rome, particularly as this featured saints, popes and relics. While people and objects travel between the two places, there is also concern to circumvent the distance involved. This article discusses an episode of miraculous communication in the Irish Life of St Colmán Élo. Here messages and messengers travel from Rome, but time and space are also telescoped through aural and material means: the sound of the bell marking the death of Pope Gregory the Great and a gift from him of Roman soil to be spread on Colmán Élo’s cemetery. The article considers how the two elements function within their hagiographical context to connect Rome and Ireland, and how these places shaped the account. The roles of bell and soil both draw on their associations in Ireland and relate to papal communication as this was experienced and imagined more widely.     

‘Almost Every Miracle is Open to Carping’: Doubts,Relics, Reliquaries and Images of Saints in the Long 12th Century

Many of the great surviving monuments from the middle ages, the cathedrals, churches and objects made for them or for private devotion, testify to the importance of Christian faith in medieval culture. Devotion to the saints was a facet of that belief, vividly recorded in the surviving relics, reliquaries and images of saints as well as in hagiographic literature. Yet medieval sources also contain references to doubts about the nature and power of saints and their relics. The overcoming of doubt or incredulity was a widely used trope in hagiography. However, if we take medieval doubts seriously, they should prompt us to consider whether the images and objects created to celebrate particular saints might sometimes have been designed to bolster dubious claims or help to authenticate disputed material within a rich discourse about both individual saints and relics and about the nature of holy bodies more generally.     

Modern and Medieval Approaches to Pilgrimage,Gender and Sacred Space

This article examines both modern ethnographical, and medieval hagiographical, constructs of sacred space in the context of female pilgrimage. Beginning with an overview of the ways in which anthropological theories of sacred space and gender have informed pilgrimage scholarship over the last fifty years, it focuses in particular on two conceptual models: that which argues that spatial practices employed by cult centres served to distance women from holy places, and that which contends that accommodation was reached between the devotional aspirations of female pilgrims on the one hand, and the institutional policies of the Church on the other. In turning to the Middle Ages, the second part of the article examines narrative representations of sacred space, and reveals that the spatial challenges posed by female pilgrimage in the medieval West were addressed and mediated in hagiography in surprisingly similar ways.     

Women's monastic enclosures in early Ireland: a study of female spirituality and male monastic mentalities

Early Irish communities of religious women have never been adequately studied. However, Irish hagiography, unique among medieval saints' lives because of the incidental details it offers, provides much evidence about nuns and nunneries. Because the Irish saints' lives were written by monks, this information also reveals the monastic attitude towards nuns. Hagiography shows that many nunneries were established before the seventh century. But these communities began to disappear soon after, so that today only the location of a dozen or so are known to historians.Women's religious communities disappeared for a combination of reasons, political, social, economic, and spiritual. Secular society was hostile towards these communities from the start because they consumed a resource considered precious by men: unmarried women. Male ecclesiastics held an ambiguous attitude towards nuns and nunneries. They believed that women could attain salvation as well as themselves. Yet the entire church hierarchy of Ireland was dominated by supposedly celibate men, whose sacral functions and ritual celibacy were threatened by women, especially women's sexuality. Hagiography expressed this threat with the theme of sinful, lustful nuns; even the spirituality of women vowed to chastity and poverty was suspect. This attitude affected the structure, organization, and eventually the survival of women's monastic enclosures in early Ireland.     

Two notes on the early history of the thema of Cherson

Abstract

1. The creation of a thema in Crimea: 841

According to the closely related accounts in De administrando imperio and in Theophanes Continuatus, the creation of a thema in Cherson was instigated by a report submitted to the emperor Theophilos by the spatharokandidatos Petronas Kamateros upon his return from a mission to Sarke1. Thus the dates of Petronas' mission determine the chronology of the creation of the thema.