A hagiography (; )[Jonathan Augustine (2012), Buddhist Hagiography in Early Japan, Routledge, ] Hinduism,[David Lorenzen (2006), Who Invented Hinduism?, Yoda Press, , pp. 120–121] Daoism,[Robert Ford Campany (2002), To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth: A Translation and Study of Ge Hong's Traditions of Divine Transcendents, University of California Press, ] 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.
When referring to modern, non-ecclesiastical works, the term is often used today as a pejorative reference to biography and historian whose authors are perceived to be uncritical or excessively reverential toward their subject.
Hagiographic works, especially those of the Middle Ages, can incorporate a record of institutional and local history, and evidence of popular cults, customs, and .[Davies, S. (2008). Archive and manuscripts: contents and use: using the sources (3rd ed.). Aberystwyth, UK: Department of Information Studies, Aberystwyth University. p. 5.20. ]
Christianity
Development
Hagiography constituted an important
literary genre in the early Christian church, providing some informational history along with the more inspirational stories and
. 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 Christianity were recorded. The dates of their deaths formed the basis of martyrology. In the 4th century, there were three main types of catalogs of lives of the saints:
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annual calendar catalogue, or menaion (in Greek language, μηναῖον, means "monthly" (Adjective, neut), lit. "lunar"), biographies of the saints to be read at ;
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synaxarion ("something that collects"; Greek συναξάριον, from σύναξις, i.e. "gathering", "collection", "compilation"), or a short version of lives of the saints, arranged by dates;
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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.
The earliest lives of saints focused on
Desert Fathers who lived as ascetics from the 4th century onwards. The life of Anthony of Egypt is usually considered the first example of this new genre of Christian biography.
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 . The bronze Gniezno Doors of Gniezno Cathedral in Poland are the only Romanesque art 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 Bollandists 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 Anglo-Norman. 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. 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.
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 Anglo-Saxon and mediaeval 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 Ælfric of Eynsham. His work Lives of the Saints
There are two known instances where saint's lives were adapted into vernacular plays in Britain. These are the Cornish language works Beunans Meriasek and Beunans Ke, about the lives of Saints Meriasek and Saint Kea, respectively.
Other examples of hagiographies from England include:
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the Chronicle by Hugh Candidus
[Barbara Yorke, Nunneries and the Anglo-Saxon Royal Houses (Continuum, 2003) p. 22]
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the Secgan
[ Stowe MS 944 , British Library][G. Hickes, Dissertatio Epistolaris in Linguarum veterum septentrionalium thesaurus grammatico-criticus et archeologicus (Oxford 1703–05), p. 115.]
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the list of John Leyland
[John Leland, The Collectanea of British affairs, Volume 2.
]
target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> p. 408.
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possibly the book Life by Saint Cadog
[ p. 345]
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Vita Sancti Ricardi Episcopi et Confessoris Cycestrensis/ Life of Richard of Chichester by Ralph Bocking.
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The Margery Kempe is an example of autohagiography, in which the subject dictates her life using the hagiographic form.
Medieval Ireland
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
Irish language. Of particular note are the lives of St. Patrick,
Columba and St. Brigit/Brigid—Ireland's three patron saints. The earliest extant Life was written by
Cogitosus. Additionally, several Irish calendars relating to the feastdays of
Christian saints (sometimes called
martyrology or
martyrology) contained abbreviated synopses of saint's lives, which were compiled from many different sources. Notable examples include the Martyrology of Tallaght and the Félire Óengusso. Such hagiographical calendars were important in establishing lists of native Irish saints, in imitation of continental calendars.
Eastern Orthodoxy
In the 10th century, a
Byzantine Empire monk Simeon Metaphrastes was the first one to change the genre of lives of the saints into something different, giving it a moralizing and
character. His catalog of lives of the saints became the standard for all of the
Western world and
Eastern world 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
, short stories and
.
The genre of lives of the saints was introduced in the Slavic world in the Bulgarian Empire in the late 9th and early 10th century, where the first original hagiographies were produced on Cyril and Methodius, Clement of Ohrid and Saint Naum. Eventually the Bulgarians brought this genre to Kievan Rus' together with writing and also in from the Greek language. In the 11th century, they began to compile the original life stories of their first saints, e.g. Boris and Gleb, Theodosius Pechersky etc. In the 16th century, Metropolitan Macarius expanded the list of the Russian 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 Great Menaion Reader), consisting of 12 in accordance with each month of the year. They were revised and expanded by St. 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 of the past.
Oriental Orthodoxy
The Oriental Orthodox Churches also have their own hagiographic traditions. For instance, Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church hagiographies in the Ge'ez language are known as
gadl (Saint's Life).
There are some 200 hagiographies about indigenous saints.
[Kefyalew Merahi. Saints and Monasteries in Ethiopia. 2 vols. Vol. 2, Addis Ababa: Commercial Printing Press, 2003.] They are among the most important
Ethiopian Empire written sources, and some have accurate historical information.
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.
Fragments from an
Old Nubian hagiography of Saint Michael are extant.
Judaism
Jewish hagiographic writings are largely a medieval and later phenomenon, attributing miracles to rabbis and figures sometimes from much earlier eras, such as those of the Talmud or the Bible. They became increasingly popular in Kabbalistic writings and later in the
Hasidic movement.
[ "Hagiography", Jewish Virtual Library.]
Islam
Hagiography in Islam began in the
Arabic language with biographical writing about the Prophet
Muhammad in the 8th century CE, a tradition known as
sīra. From about the 10th century CE, a genre generally known as
manāqib also emerged, which comprised biographies of the
(
madhāhib) who founded different schools of Islamic thought (
madhhab) about
Sharia, and of Ṣūfī saints. Over time, hagiography about Ṣūfīs and their miracles came to predominate in the genre of
manāqib.
[Ch. Pellat, "Manāḳib", in Encyclopaedia of Islam, ed. by P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, and W.P. Heinrichs, 2nd edn, 12 vols (Leiden: Brill, 1960–2005), .]
Likewise influenced by early Islamic Hadith studies 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 language 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.[Alexandre Papas, "Hagiography, Persian and Turkish", in Encyclopaedia of Islam, Three, ed. by Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, and Everett Rowson (Leiden: Brill, 2007–), .]
Other groups
The pseudobiography of L. Ron Hubbard compiled by the Church of Scientology is commonly described as a heavily fictionalized hagiography.
See also
Further reading
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Berschin, Walter. Biographie und Epochenstil im lateinischen Mittelalter. 5 volumes. Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1986–2004, .
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DeWeese, Devin. Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde: Baba Tukles and Conversion to Islam in Historical and Epic Tradition. State College, PA: Penn State University Press, 2007.
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Eden, Jeff. Warrior Saints of the Silk Road: Legends of the Qarakhanids. Brill: Leiden, 2018.
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Heffernan, Thomas J. Sacred Biography: Saints and Their Biographers in the Middle Ages. Oxford University Press, 1992.
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Mariković, Ana and Vedriš, Trpimir eds. Identity and alterity in Hagiography and the Cult of Saints (Bibliotheca Hagiotheca, Series Colloquia 1). Zagreb: Hagiotheca, 2010.
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Renard, John. Friends of God: Islamic Images of Piety, Commitment, and Servanthood. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.
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Vauchez, André, La sainteté en Occident aux derniers siècles du Moyen Âge (1198–1431) ( BEFAR, 241). Rome, 1981. Engl..
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von der Nahmer, Dieter. Die lateinische Heiligenvita. Eine Einführung in die lateinische Hagiographie. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1994, .
External links
