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Introduction

Thomas Head

When Eddius Stephanus, an Anglo-Saxon priest, sat down to write The Life of Bishop Wilfrid in the early decades of the eighth century, he mused, “This very task of preserving the blessed memory of Bishop Wilfrid is of great gain and value to myself. Indeed it is in itself a ready path to virtue to know what [Wilfrid] was.”1 And so he did not simply record the actions of Wilfrid, but did so both to advance the cause of his own salvation and to educate his audi­ence in the proper practice of Christianity. Those spiritual and pedagogic con­cerns lie at the heart of the genre, or more properly genres, of hagiography. Works of hagiography can thus tell us at least as much about the author and about those who used the text―their ideals and practices, their concerns and aspirations―as it does about the saints who are their subjects. Hagiography provides some of the most valuable records for the reconstruction and study of the practice of premodern Christianity.2

This volume attempts to chart the development of hagiography though the Middle Ages by presenting a set of important exemplary texts in English translation. With the exception of a few of the earliest texts in the collection― works which were formative in laying the groundwork for later develop­ments―they are works which either appear here for the first time in English or which are no longer readily available in translation. Thus many well- known hagiographic texts are absent from this collection, because they are available with reasonable ease to students and teachers. Some of those trans­lations will be pointed out in the notes to this introduction or in the introduc­tions to the individual chapters. I have deliberately adopted an expansive chronology of the Middle Ages: the texts range from the fourth through the fifteenth centuries. The medieval world represented, while broad in geograph­ical and thus cultural scope, is nonetheless largely confined to Western or Latin-speaking Christendom. One of the chief reasons for omitting Byzantine Christendom and the Eastern worlds it influenced is a practical one: Dumbar­ton Oaks has recently begun a laudable and ambitious project to translate a large and representative group of Greek Lives of saints into English.3 Although explicitly Christian in its origins, the term “hagiography” has also been adopted by scholars of other religions, most notably Judaism and Islam, to refer to analogous writings in those traditions. For a variety of practical reasons, examples of such non-Christian writings have also been omitted from this collection, with the notable exception of Jewish martyrological liter­ature which memorialized Jews slaughtered at the hands of Christians.

Hagiography is quite simply “writings about the saints.” It is a word of relatively modern vintage coined from Greek roots: hagios, that is, holy, or by extension, saint, and graphē, that is, writing. (Medieval writers, in contrast, tended to use similar words derived from the same roots to mean the books of the Bible, literally “holy writings.”) The sorts of literature which fit under the rubric of hagiography are extremely varied, including Lives of saints, collec­tions of miracle stories, accounts of the discovery or movement of relics, bulls of canonization, inquests held into the life of a candidate for canonization, liturgical books, sermons, and visions. Hence it is best to consider hagiogra­phy not so much as a single genre, but as a collection of genres, many of which are represented in the texts below. It is only possible to understand the term, and the works included in this collection, with reference to the Christian concept of sanctity. Saints were quite literally holy men and women (holy is the root meaning of sanctus and sancta in Latin, from which our English word “saint” is derived via medieval vernacular usages). But the word “saint” came to have the status of a title designating those who had lived a life of heroic virtue and then been posthumously judged by God to be worthy of entrance to the kingdom of heaven. In theory all who resided in the divine court were saints, but in practice Christian churches accorded a relatively small number of people the title of saint and, with it, public veneration. (In this collection, the translators have attempted to distinguish between these different meanings by use of the abbreviation “St.” in reference to the title and of the simple word “holy” where they think no such official meaning is implied, thus glossing over an often deliberate ambiguity which exists in many medieval texts.)

The veneration of those people deemed to be saints lay at the core of the practice of medieval Christianity. For saints were, both during their lives and after their deaths, key members of the Christian community. Saints demon­strated their holiness through their actions, whether it be in the willingness to accept martyrdom, in the rigors of extreme asceticism, in the wise exercise of episcopal office, or in the heroic defense of their virginity. With God’s assis­tance they could turn that holiness into miraculous actions, such as curing the sick, defeating their enemies without the use of force, and exorcising demons. Those miraculous powers were not extinguished by death, for posthumously the saint was a resident of God’s court, whose intercessory powers could be invoked by living Christians through prayer and pilgrimage, donation and devotion. There could be no better advocate at the final judgment than some­one who already belonged to the “fatherland” of heaven. It is no accident that in Latin the single word virtus (which can be translated variously as virtue or power) was used to denote both pious actions and miracles which tran­scended the rules of nature.

Only a limited number of holy people came to be recognized and honored with the title of saint. The means by which that recognition was officially granted developed significantly over the course of the Middle Ages, and even differed regionally. Central to any official recognition of sainthood, however, was the celebration of a feast which marked the day of the saint’s death, that is, of his or her birth into the divine kingdom. In practical terms then, the liv­ing holy man or woman only gained sainthood when accepted by a commu­nity of believers and blessed by an ecclesiastical authority. In one important sense sanctity is thus a social construct, and it is texts such as those which fol­low that allow the student of Christian history to reconstruct the evolution of the ideals and practice of holiness.

One of the most important factors in the changing character of sanctity over the course of the Middle Ages was gender. The recognition of, or more importantly the failure to recognize, women as saints betrays many of the misogynist traits typical of medieval society and culture. While most medieval theologians conceded a theoretical equality between men and women in their ability to be saved, they almost uniformly saw men as more likely to practice the virtues necessary for salvation. Moreover women were excluded from the Christian clergy and thus from the callings which produced the majority of saints recognized during certain periods. Throughout the Middle Ages women were a distinct minority among those Christians whose reputation for holiness received public celebration and thus earned for them the title of saint.

The first Christians to be honored as saints were martyrs, who had died for giving witness to the faith during the periodic persecutions which oppressed the new religion throughout the Roman empire.4 While many sto­ries of martyrs and their relics are included within this collection, they all come from later periods. I have decided to omit the authentically early stories of martyrs―that is, the earliest form of Christian hagiography―and begin the “long” Middle Ages represented in this collection after the official accep­tance of Christianity by the emperor Constantine through the Edict of Milan in 313. Over the course of the fourth and early fifth centuries, the develop­ment of new types of accepted sanctity, beyond the ideal of martyrdom, and the development of the public veneration of the relics of saints laid the foun­dations for the medieval traditions of hagiography and the cult of saints. The first four chapters in this collection illustrate these developments: they there­fore deserve a more detailed introduction. Two of them are Greek texts from the eastern Mediterranean, for during this period―despite the many differ­ences already developing between Latin and Greek speaking Christians―the world of Christianity was still largely integrated with that of the Roman Empire.

It was the burgeoning ascetic movement, in which lay the beginnings of Christian monasticism, in the Egyptian desert that provided the first new ideal of sanctity. 5 Rejecting the norms of society, monks (the word comes from a Greek term meaning “those who live alone”) left the settled communities of the Nile valley for desolate places where they created an alternative society centered on prayer and rigorous ascetic practice (including fasting, chastity, and poverty). Around 360, Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria (d. 73) com­posed the Life of St. Antony of Egypt (Chapter 1), one of the first and most charismatic members of the nascent monastic movement. The Life was soon translated from Greek to other languages in order to communicate and dis­seminate the ideals of monasticism. Soon ascetic holy people began to set up hermitages and monasteries in the deserted outback of Palestine, Syria, and Anatolia. Many works were written concerning the practices of these monks, not only in Greek, the official bureaucratic and ecclesiastical language of the eastern Roman provinces, but in the vernacular languages of Coptic and Syr­iac.6 The traditions of ascetic hagiography and with it the practice of monasti­cism penetrated into the western provinces of the Roman Empire through the translation of some of these works about Eastern monks into Latin, as well as through the writings of two westerners who sojourned for long periods in the East, Jerome (d. 419/20) and John Cassian (d. ca. 433).7 The heart of the new hagiography was didactic; the new type of saints came to be known as confes­sors, those who confessed or taught the faith. Indeed Augustine of Hippo (d. 430) heard the Life of St. Antony during the winter of 386, quite possibly through the mediation of Jerome, and counted it as a crucial influence in his conversion to Christianity and celibacy.8 Athanasius’s Life was to remain a central reference points for all writers of hagiography, both Eastern and West­ern, throughout the Middle Ages.

It was in 386 that Bishop Ambrose of Milan (d. 397), Augustine’s friend and mentor, discovered the relics of two martyrs named Gervasius and Protasius and enshrined them in a church within the center of that city.9 While this was hardly the beginning of the public veneration of relics (Constantine him­self had had several basilicas built over the tombs of martyrs in and around Rome), Ambrose’s actions did much to excite widespread interest in the dis­covery and acquisition of the relics of martyrs. About a decade later, Bishop Victricius of Rouen wrote In Praise of the Saints (Chapter 2) to commemorate the arrival in his diocese, located far from Rome in the western reaches of the empire, of a group of martyrs’ relics which were immediately enshrined in a central church in that city. It is one of the earliest pieces of hagiography to document the practice of the cult of relics. The decades around the year 400 witnessed many attempts to disinter or discover, distribute, and enshrine relics of the saints. Typical of these were the stories―told about this time first in Greek, but soon translated into Latin, Syriac, and virtually every language of the Christian world―which attributed the discovery (technically known as an inventio) of the relics of the most important of all martyrdoms, that is the True Cross of Christ, to the emperor Constantine and his mother, Helena. These traditions were told and retold many times over the course of the com­ing centuries. E. Gordon Whatley has collected several Latin versions of these traditions (Chapter 4), beginning with an account from the late fourth cen­tury and ending with one from the tenth century.

Sometime around 396, a learned Christian layman named Sulpicius Severus composed his Life of St. Martin of Tours. Although Sulpicius Severus acknowledged the importance of the Life of St. Antony as a model and while much of the work was centered upon Martin’s vigorous asceticism, Martin (d. 397) was also bishop of Tours and Sulpicius’s work inaugurated yet another type of hagiography celebrating yet a new type of saint. In time this work became for Western hagiographers perhaps an even more important model than the work of Athanasius. Over the course of the next few decades, four more Lives of bishops―Ambrose of Milan, Augustine of Hippo, Epiphanius of Salamis, and Porphyry of Gaza―were written.10 It is the last of these, a Greek composition from Egypt, which is included in this collection (Chapter 3), but the genre was to have a long and important life in both Eastern and Western hagiography.

All these works were written by men who were members of the Christian elite of the Roman Empire. They reflect the extraordinary power and influ­ence which Christianity had gained during the century following the edict of Milan, as well as the variety of practices and pieties in that world. It was, however, a world which was on the cusp of an enormous transformation. Already in the final decades of the fourth century, Germanic peoples such as the Goths had begun to migrate into the western regions of the empire. In 410 a Gothic army sacked Rome; in 456 Rome, now in theory protected in part by Goths, was sacked by Vandals. Even as the Germans slowly carved up the western empire into successor kingdoms each dominated by a different Ger­manic people, these peoples were undergoing conversion to Christianity and accepting the Latin language as the most important medium of writing. In the process, Christianity and its notions of sanctity were translated into new cul­tural idioms, eventually in areas well beyond the western and northern boundaries of the Roman Empire.11 For the fifth and much of the sixth cen­tury, however, most of the Christians recognized as saints in the former west­ern provinces of the empire continued to be Romans who followed traditional monastic and episcopal roles, albeit in a manner tailored to changing circum­stances.12 Traditionally recognized Roman saints also continued to be impor­tant through their relics, as well as through the liturgical commemoration of their feasts. One of the best cases in point is the cult of St. Martin of Tours, who came to be seen as a patron of Gaul by both Romans and Franks. As Martin’s reputation grew over the course of the fifth century, pilgrims flocked in increasing numbers to his tomb outside of Tours, where an important new church was built over the shrine in the 460s. On the outside of that building an inscription read, “When you have bowed down to the earth, your face sunk in the dust, your wet eyes pressed to the beaten ground, raise your eyes, and, with a trembling glance, perceive wonders and commit your cause to the best of patrons . . . Ask for [Martin’s] assistance: it is not in vain that you knock at this door.”13

The hagiographers themselves also continued to be men of the Roman elite, most notably Gregory of Tours (d. 593/4) in Gaul and Gregory the Great (d. 604) in Italy.14 They wrote not simply to record and preserve the past, but to influence the present, holding up their stories of holy men and women as examples of Christian conduct. Gregory of Tours introduced one of his works by saying, “I have recently discovered information about those who have been raised to heaven by the merit of their blessed conduct here below, and I thought that their way of life, which is known to us through reliable sources, could strengthen the Church . . . because the life of the saints . . . encourages the minds of listeners to follow their example.”15 In the later sixth and the seventh centuries, sanctity came to be accorded to men and women of the bar­barian peoples, whose modes of holiness reflected much of the distinctive styles Christianity was developing in their kingdoms.16 Not just the nature, but even the language of Western hagiography was slowly changing. In Ire­land, a land never part of the Roman Empire, hagiography was appearing both in Latin and in Old Irish by the seventh century.17 And in Anglo-Saxon England, works of hagiography, a staple of local Latin literature from the sev­enth century, were appearing in Old English by at least the ninth century.18 As the notes to this paragraph indicate, much of the hagiography extant from the barbarian kingdoms has already been made available in English translation. But three important new translations are included here. The Life of the Holy Virgin Samthann (Chapter 5) provides a window into the novel forms of monasticism in Ireland, marked by a particularly rigorous asceticism and an acceptance of women such as Samthann. As is seen in sections of Jonas of Bobbio’s Life of St. Columbanus (Chapter 6), the influence of that Irish monasticism spread in the seventh century to the European continent, partic­ularly in the kingdoms of the Franks. Dado of Rouen’s Life of St. Eligius of Noyon (Chapter 7) concerns a member of the Frankish nobility who chose an ecclesiastical rather than a military career, one which documents the ways in which the customs of the Roman episcopate had been altered to fit the reali­ties of the Frankish kingdoms.

The public cult accorded to saints in the early medieval west took many forms. One pervasive mode was liturgical. During the Mass and the monastic office, a list of the martyrs and other saints whose feasts fell on that day was read. Lists covering the entire liturgical year were developed which included short biographical entries for some of the more important saints. These works, known as martyrologies, varied greatly according to the local needs of individual dioceses or monastic houses. One of the most influential, the so- called Martyrologium Hieronymianum, was incorrectly attributed to the fifth-century Christian scholar Jerome. Another particularly influential ver­sion was that compiled by the seventh-century Anglo-Saxon monk Bede (Chapter 8), a work which shows how hagiographic traditions from all over the ancient Roman Empire had traveled to England, whence they would be brought back to the continent via copies of Bede’s work. Relics of the saints continued to be important foci for the devotions of Christians both Roman and barbarian. In many areas which had been part of the Roman empire, such relics were plentiful in the cemeteries and shrines which surrounded old Roman cities. In more newly converted areas, however, relics had to come either from saints of a more recent vintage or to be obtained elsewhere. Mar­tyrs’ relics from Rome itself acquired a particularly high status in the barbar­ian kingdoms. Einhard, a Frankish noble and member of the court of Charlemagne, told in the Translation of the Relics of Sts. Marcellinus and Peter (Chapter 9) how his agents had gone to Rome and there acquired the relics of two martyrs through means perhaps best described as “holy theft.” Einhard had the relics brought back to a chapel constructed on his own lands, located in what is now Germany. The expansion of Western Christendom into newly converted lands and its encounter with powerful non-Christian peoples resulted in a renewal of the oldest form of Christian sanctity, that is, martyr­dom. It was still defined as a death incurred because of witness to the Chris­tian faith. Many sorts of Christians could still encounter this violence: missionaries such as Boniface, killed during the eighth century by polytheists resisting conversion; kings such as Edmund of East Anglia, slain in the ninth century by marauding Vikings; common laypeople who lived under non-Christian rule such as Pelagius, executed in the tenth century by the Muslim caliph who ruled the Iberian peninsula.19 It is this latter’s story which was recorded by a Spanish priest named Raguel in the Martyrdom of St. Pelagius (Chapter 10) and which stands in this collection for an extremely varied phe­nomenon, as well as for western Christendom’s often violent encounter with Islam.

During the late eighth and early ninth centuries, Charlemagne created an empire based on the old Frankish kingdoms and revived the use of the Roman imperial title in the West. It was this Carolingian Empire, named after and ruled over by Charles’s family, that served to organize much of the basic polit­ical structures of continental western Europe for centuries to come. Even as it fractured into many constituent kingdoms, the most important (most accu­rately denoted during this period as the western and eastern Frankish king­doms) became the seeds for the kingdoms of France and Germany (and through the latter for the so-called Holy Roman Empire). The powerful eccle­siastical hierarchy of the Carolingian empire and its successors did much to clarify the traditions around the recognition of saints and the practice of the cult of relics, as is reflected in Einhard’s above-mentioned Translation of the Relics of Sts. Marcellinus and Peter.20 From the ninth through the twelfth cen­turies, monasteries became the chief custodians of the cult of relics. Several chapters present texts which illustrate different aspects of this intimate rela­tionship between monastic communities and the liturgies and relics of the saints. In Chapter 13, I have gathered together a group of short texts to illus­trate the processes through which relics were enshrined and pilgrims came to visit them. In Hrotsvit of Gandersheim’s The Establishment of the Monastery of Gandersheim (Chapter 11), the bones of deceased saints and the actions of living holy women are central to the foundation and development of a com­munity of nuns. In The Miracles of St. Ursmer on His Journey through Flan­ders (Chapter 16), a group of monks take the relics of their patron saint on what amounts to a fund-raising tour. And in The Book of Ely (Chapter 22) the monks discuss how the miraculous powers of their long-dead patron help them in the acquisition and defense of property. These are but a few examples of what was an enormous monastic literature composed about the miraculous powers of saintly patrons over the course of these four centuries.21 These tra­ditions and practices were not, however, universally accepted. Abbot Guibert of Nogent―himself a monk and occasionally an ardent believer in the efficacy of certain saints’ cults―produced one of the most sustained critiques in On Saints and Their Relics (Chapter 19). Clerics were also not above using hagiography as a vehicle for satire, as in A Tale of Doomsday Colum Cille Should Have Left Untold (Chapter 20), an entertaining and perplexing adap­tation of the forms of Old Irish bardic poets to a Christian purpose.

The cults of long-dead saints enshrined in monastic churches provided a continuity with the past. And new saints continued to be recognized in accord with traditional paradigms of sanctity.22 New forms of sanctity, however, were also emerging over the course of these same centuries. One important form was the association of sanctity with the royal dynasties of certain bar­barian kingdoms.23 During the late tenth century, Odilo of Cluny detailed in his Epitaph of the August Lady, Adelheid (Chapter 12) the importance of women as bearers of children and of memory to the Ottonian clan of the east­ern Frankish or German kingdom. Over a century later, a priest named Hartvic celebrated the holiness of the first Christian king of the newly con­verted Hungarians in the Life of King Stephen of Hungary (Chapter 18). Opponents of royal power could also occasionally gain sainthood through martyrdom, as in the famed case of Archbishop Thomas Becket of Canter­bury, murdered by barons in his church.24 The liturgical offices for feasts of this saint presented below (Chapter 26) provide a sense of how that man was memorialized, as well as how hagiography was regularly incorporated into the liturgy. A second form of new saints were those associated with the many new forms of reform monasticism which began during these centuries. One important development within this movement was a revival of eremitic monasticism, whose practitioners intended to return to the ascetic practice of the earliest monks in the eastern deserts. Over the previous two centuries hagiography had come to focus ever more exclusively on the miraculous pow­ers of the saint, but in the Lives of these men hagiographers returned to an interest in the spiritual life and ascetic exercises of saints, including frequent comparisons to such ancient hagiography as the Lives of the Desert Fathers. Peter Damian described one of the most influential of these hermits in the Life of St. Romuald of Ravenna (Chapter 14).25 The most important by far of the new orders of the twelfth century was the Cistercians. Works in many genres, including hagiography, depicted the spiritual practice and thus the lives of such abbots as Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) and Aelred of Rievaulx (d. 1167) as ascents to God in a manner characteristic of Cistercian psychology and spirituality.26 The Cistercian monks and saints were thus portrayed as imitators of their ancient predecessors in works like The Tract on the Conver­sion of Pons of Léras and the True Account of the Beginning of the Monastery at Silvanès (Chapter 23). Latin had by this time become a learned language, used throughout western Christendom by priests and monks, scholars and bureaucrats, but spoken nowhere as a native tongue. A third innovation was that hagiography in the Romance vernacular languages began to appear in the eleventh century; as it did it took on many of the traits of the genres of ver­nacular literature.27 The Life of St. Alexis (Chapter 15), one of the earliest surviving and most important pieces of vernacular hagiography, details the story of the conversion of a nobleman who gives up wealth and marriage for a life of voluntary poverty and severe asceticism. In an analogous manner, the thirteenth-century author of the Saga of Bishop Jón of Hólar (Chapter 27) used an Old Icelandic form usually employed to tell the stories of heroes and villains to narrate the career of a bishop creating ecclesiastical structures in a land which had been Christian for only a couple of centuries. Much vernacu­lar hagiography was based on Latin originals. One such Latin source, later translated into several vernacular versions, was the Life of the Dear Friends Amicus and Amelius (Chapter 21), which portrays―using conventions shared with vernacular romances―the almost paradoxical problems which the practice of Christianity posed for members of a secular nobility based on military power and the making of war.

It should also be noted here that collections of miracles associated with that very special female saint, the Virgin Mary, became a staple of both Latin and vernacular literatures over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth cen­turies. The example which appears in this collection, some selections from Gautier de Coincy’s Miracles of the Virgin Mary (Chapter 28), is one of the most important Old French texts concerning the cult of the Virgin, but similar examples could be found in virtually every language of Latin Christendom. The cult of the Virgin itself was one of the oldest in Christendom, her feasts were an important part of the calendar, and a prayer invoking her aid (the Ave Maria or “Hail Mary”) was one of the best known Latin prayers among the laity. But literary expressions of the legends about the Virgin’s life and her miraculous powers tended to be restricted, in the West at least, to the liturgy until the twelfth century. The flowering of a Marian devotional literature coincided with the rise of a number of important pilgrimages to shrines fea­turing relics of the Virgin, such as Rocamadour and Chartres in France, Walsingham in England, or Montserrat in Spain.

During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, members of the Christian cleri­cal hierarchy worked at consolidating the power of the institutional Church in part by attacking vulnerable or outcast members of society. One major component of this process was the development of the clerical campaign against heresy, which included the prosecution and often execution of reli­gious dissidents. The attempt to control, indeed eradicate, certain alternative forms of Christianity at times amounted to a campaign of persecution directed by the Church. The stories of heretics, preserved in trial transcripts as well as narrative works, were in an almost literal way the very anti-type of the stories of the saints.28 Three very disturbing sets of stories translated below show how hagiography can also document aspects of these processes. In the Life of St. Godelieve (Chapter 17), the eleventh-century priest Drogo narrated the story of a noblewoman whose entanglement in a brutally abusive mar­riage led to her death.29 While the male cleric’s depiction of this violent death as a form of martyrdom is undoubtedly sympathetic to the female victim, it is just as surely steeped in the deep misogyny of his culture. Anti-semitism was also dramatically on the rise, linked at least in part to the development of the Crusades.30 The twelfth-century cleric Thomas of Monmouth recorded the first known accusation against Jews with the so-called blood libel in the Life and Passion of St. William of Norwich (Chapter 24). The accusation of Jews with the murder of Christian infants or other trumped-up charges often led to the execution of numbers of Jews. A series of Hebrew works memorializing as martyrs the Jews murdered in the French town of Blois in 1171 (Chapter 25) provides a poignant and telling counterpoint to Thomas of Monmouth’s blood libel. The saints who are the subject of these works, the only examples of non-Christian hagiography included in this collection, were the victims of Christian executioners.

New religious movements developed in the thirteenth century which transformed the practice of the religious life, and with it the face of sanctity. Indeed, in Western Christendom, the thirteenth century produced more Chris­tians celebrated by their contemporaries as saints than any other period of the Middle Ages, one tally puts the number at over five hundred. A remarkably high percentage, over a quarter, of these “modern” saints were women. The most influential of the new movements were the mendicant orders, particu­larly the Franciscans and Dominicans. The primary ideal of these movements was voluntary poverty. The elevation of the ideal of poverty helped to break down some of the distinctions between the religious and the lay life. Chris­tians of both sexes used the mendicant ideal―both formally, within the orders, and informally, in associated confraternities and other groups―to live a religious life in the ordinary world, outside the walls of the monastic clois­ter. One important lay leader, a merchant from Lyon named Peter Waldes, was moved in part by hearing a performance of the Life of St. Alexis (Chapter 15) to use his wealth for the alleviation of famine and poverty. Over the course of the later middle ages, informal groups of so-called tertiaries or third orders―such as the vowed virgins known as beguines in the cities of the Low Coun­tries or those known as beatae in the cities of Italy―would become almost as influential in matters of religious practices as the formal orders of priests and nuns. Many of the leading figures of these movements came to be celebrated as saints. Few figures of the Middle Ages were to produce such a large and complex hagiographic tradition as Francis of Assisi (d. 1226), and many other members of the Franciscans and Dominicans had their chroniclers. A signifi­cant amount of this hagiographic literature from the mendicant orders already is available in English.31 It was not only the men (and women) of the formal orders who were celebrated as saints. Clerics such as Jacques de Vitry and Thomas de Cantimpré were drawn to Flanders by stories of sanctity and there lovingly recorded the careers of a number of Beguines and nuns in the region of Liège, including Mary of Oignies, Christina of Saint-Trond, and Lutgard of Aywières. In championing this novel approach to the religious life, which combined traditional asceticism with charitable works and teaching, these hagiographers provided a model for late medieval female sanctity whose characteristics included strenuous fasting, ecstatic visions, devotion to the Eucharist, and service to the urban poor. Once again much of this remarkable literature has been made available in English translation.32

The tombs of some new saints, such as Bernard of Tiron (d. 1117) and Louis of Anjou (d. 1297), enjoyed brief vogues in attracting pilgrims, but more commonly the importance of these new saints was linked to their holy example―as transmitted in hagiography―and powers of intercession―as sought in private devotional prayer―rather than to pilgrimage to their shrines. This does not mean that the physical remains of these holy men and women were not prized. The Dominican confessor of Margaret of Ypres (d. 1237) asked the saint’s mother to provide him with some of her possessions, such as headresses and shoelaces, after the young girl’s death.

Because such good examples of the hagiography of the new religious orders from the thirteenth and even fourteenth centuries are available in En­glish and because these Lives tended to be lengthy works, only two examples of these genres are included in this collection. The first (Chapter 31) is a trans­lation into Middle English of Jacques de Vitry’s Life of St. Marie d’Oignies, one of the most influential of the Flemish Beguines. As a translation of Latin hagiography into a vernacular language, this text provides an example not only of the ideals of voluntary poverty and feminine sanctity so important in the thirteenth century, but also of the efforts made to make these stories avail­able to a wider audience. The second (Chapter 32) is the so-called Autobiog­raphy of Peter of the Morrone, a noted Franciscan ascetic who briefly became pope as Celestine V. This document reminds us that there is a rich tradition extant from the later Middle Ages of self-reflective spiritual and mystical texts written by men and women who came posthumously to be considered saints, a tradition of writing which some scholars have called “auto-hagiography.”33

The proliferation of such contemporary saints caused clerics to become anxious about their control over the legends and the cults of the new saints. Beginning in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, but decisively in the thir­teenth century, the papacy moved to take control of the legal means by which new saints were officially recognized. Such papal canonization involved legal inquiries into the lives of reputed saints: not all such inquiries, known techni­cally as processus canonizationis or “processes of canonization,” resulted in a positive verdict. The records of these inquiries, conducted by clerics who interviewed witnesses, represent a new form of hagiography and one of the most precious sources for information about religious practice in the later Middle Ages. Extracts from one such process, which resulted in the canoniza­tion of the French Dominican preacher Vincent Ferrer (d. 1419), is included in this collection (Chapter 35).34 Relatively few individuals actually achieved such papal canonization (some seventy-two between 1198 and 1418) and so many of the “holy people” of the later Middle Ages, although celebrated like the saints in local liturgies, curing shrines, and hagiography, should technically be known under the title “blessed” according to the practices of the Roman Catholic Church. Such are the inherent ambiguities of the term “saint.”

The cults of these new saints did not by any means supplant the cults of traditional saints. Indeed the cults of many martyrs and other saintly patrons drawn from the early centuries of Christianity became even more important and widespread through liturgical commemoration and iconographic repre­sentation over the course of the later Middle Ages. Relics came to be dis­played more prominently in the churches of the later Middle Ages than they had been in earlier periods. New fragments of saintly bodies were eagerly sought and placed in ornate reliquaries. Many relics were brought to Western Christendom as spoils from the East during the course of the crusades. In 1248, for example, that vigorous crusader King Louis IX of France (who was later considered to be a saint) had the beautiful Sainte Chapelle in Paris built as a form of relic treasury: the building even imitated a reliquary in its very shape. Other forms of church ornamentation also celebrated the cult of saints, as hagiographic legends were prominently displayed in stained-glass windows and painted tryptychs. Pilgrimage to the shrines of certain saints of the tradi­tional order also remained important. Raymond Clemens has gathered a group of documents (Chapter 29) illustrating how the Dominican order culti­vated the cult of the biblical figure Mary Magdalen, particularly around the shrine of her relics which the Dominicans controlled in Provence. It is a useful reminder that pilgrimage to shrines of local significance remained important, although they were superseded by shrines of transregional meaning, such as those of the martyrs in Rome, the many Marian shrines, or the Holy Sepul­chre of Jesus and other sites connected with His life around Jerusalem.35

Another means of inculcating the correct practice of Christianity, and one which particularly developed in association with the mendicant orders, was preaching. One of the reasons for the success of those orders was the vigorous attempts being made on the part of the ecclesiastical hierarchy to reach the urban laity. Preachers needed collections of exemplary stories of a sort differ­ent from that produced for monastic novices. Many such collections which made use of hagiographic traditions were gathered for preaching purposes. The most influential hagiographic compendium in Western Christendom dur­ing the later Middle Ages was the Golden Legend, completed by Jacapo da Voragine, an Italian Dominican, in 1258.36

The translation of legends concerning traditional saints into the vernacu­lar languages served as an important part of this widespread clerical effort to disseminate and inculcate proper religious practice. Although written in Latin, for example, the Golden Legend became available in virtually every vernacular language of western Christendom by the fifteenth century. These and the translations of many other works into the varied vernaculars greatly dominated, in terms of the sheer number of texts, the hagiographic produc­tion of the later Middle Ages.37 Hagiography thus became much more avail­able to an audience of religious women and laypeople who were literate only in the vernacular. “Translation” is often not an accurate term for these works, which were often very free in their rendering of the Latin originals. Often the authors of these vernacular legends followed the style of contemporary epics and romances, although they also self-consciously attempted to produce a morally uplifting rival to such secular works. The author of a Life of St. Bar­bara in Old French claimed, contrasting the heroines of her tale to the heroes of the popular Song of Roland, “I want to tell a new kind of story, / Never heard before. / Know that it does not concern Ogier, / Nor Roland, nor Olivier, / But a most holy maiden / Who was very courteous and beautiful.”38 The moralist Thomas of Chobham specifically exempted those jongleurs, or minstrels, who performed works about the saints from his general condemna­tion of that profession. In the process of adaptation, the legends often changed, and it is often important to study what authors of vernacular hagiography omitted from or changed in their traditional sources. In a com­pelling illustration of this process, Wendy Larson has brought together several significantly differing versions of the legend of the martyr Margaret of Anti­och (Chapter 30) which circulated in England, both in Middle English and in Latin (specifically the relevant section from the Golden Legend), during the latter part of the thirteenth century. The legends of the early Christian martyrs were also differentiated by the linguistic and national context within which they appeared in the vernacular. An excellent example is provided by the Old Czech version of the Life of St. Catherine of Alexandria (Chapter 34), who was, like Margaret, purported to be a martyr on slim historical evidence. One of the earliest pieces of hagiography extant in Czech, this work―composed by a cleric, quite possibly a Dominican preacher, in the entourage of Emperor Charles IV―gives evidence not only of a desire to make the teachings of the Golden Legend available to a wider public, but also distinctly nationalist con­cerns related to the status of the Slavic languages. Similarly, but on the other side of Western Christendom, the Old Welsh version of the Life of St. David (Chapter 33)―a sixth-century missionary bishop and the national patron of Wales―also betrays a complex combination of religious and political con­cerns as it provides access to ancient Latin traditions for a fourteenth-century audience literate in the vernacular. Through texts like these, saints from the ancient past continued to be present and active for pious Christians of the late medieval West.

The celebration of traditional saints certainly remained an important ele­ment in the culture of devotion practiced by pious laypeople not only in churches and other public religious spaces, but also in the home. Preachers used exemplary stories gleaned from the lives of the saints to spice up their sermons. Glass-fronted reliquaries made bits of holy bodies visible to the faithful. Confraternities adopted appropriate saints as their patrons and cele­brated their feasts in elaborate fashion. Books of hours promoted the obser­vance of many feasts, as well as the cult of the Virgin Mary, in the home. Individuals and communities sought the aid of “specialist” saints with partic­ular problems, such as St. Roch for the plague and St. Margaret of Antioch for difficult childbirths.

Over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, however, devo­tion to the passion of Christ and bodily mortification, accompanied by a heightened emotionalism often expressed in the so-called gift of tears, began to take a more central place in spiritual and penitential practices.39 The varied reformations of the sixteenth century, both Protestant and Catholic, brought with them radical changes in the practice of the cult of saints. Protestant the­ologians and preachers rejected the idea of saintly intercession, which was thought in Lutheran terminology to constitute a reliance on works rather than on faith. Reformers of all stripes―Desiderius Erasmus and Thomas More, Martin Luther and John Calvin―composed, generally in the vernacular, cri­tiques of the cult of relics.40 Theological opposition often turned to violent iconoclasm during the Wars of Religion. Relic collections were destroyed and the statues of the saints in many churches still bear the scars of attack. In the mid-sixteenth century, the Council of Trent took many steps to reorganize the practice of the cult of saints and the means by which saints were canonized within early modern Catholicism.

In the midst of these conflicts and changes, a person’s holiness was often examined by hostile secular courts or religious tribunals for conformity to a prevalent orthodoxy. Well before the Protestant Reformation, some who claimed visionary or miraculous powers―women more often than men―were burned for heresy or witchcraft, even when their claims and practices did not vary greatly from those of some saints canonized by the Church. The final texts in this collection come from just such a case in the fifteenth century. Joan of Arc was a visionary who used her prophetic powers as a means of brilliantly, if evanescently, rallying the military fortunes of the kingdom of France against the English forces which occupied much of its territory. Sen­tenced to death by a corrupt ecclesiastical tribunal dominated by English interests, she was burnt at the stake for heresy in 1431. Virtually from that moment she was treated by the French as a saint and national patron. Almost five hundred years later, her visions and actions served as the basis for an offi­cial inquiry which led to her canonization as a saint in 1920. Nadia Margolis has collected a dossier of texts (Chapter 36) to illustrate Joan’s varied trials. It provides an appropriate, if ambiguous, note on which to conclude this collec­tion.

Guide to further reading

In this guide, I seek to provide information about some important reference works and general studies in the field of hagiography. Much in the way of more specific references may be found in the guides which accompany each chapter. I will emphasize works available in English. (For translations of pri­mary sources into English, one may consult the notes to this introduction.) Unfortunately no adequate general guide to the history, study, and use of hagiography exists in English. The best introduction to research in hagio­graphic sources currently available is Jacques Dubois and Jean-Loup Lemaitre, Sources et méthodes de l’hagiographie médiévale [Sources and methods of medieval hagiography] (Paris, 1993), which includes an extensive, but largely Francophone, bibliography. René Aigrain, L’hagiographie: ses sources, ses méthodes, son histoire [Hagiography: its sources, its methods, its history] (Paris, 1953) remains useful, particularly on the history of hagio­graphic scholarship. David Knowles, Great Historical Enterprises (London, 1962) and several of the chapters in Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Stud­ies on the Formation of a Discipline, ed. Helen Damico and Joseph Zavadil (New York, 1995) provide much information on the early history of hagio­graphic scholarship.

A major scholarly enterprise under the direction of the Belgian scholar Guy Philippart is currently collecting a series of surveys of medieval hagio­graphic sources and the scholarly study of them; two of its volumes have already been published. When complete, it will be the most comprehensive guide to hagiographic scholarship: Hagiographies. Histoire internationale de la littérature hagiographique latine et vernaculaire en Occident des origines à 1500 [Hagiographies: an international history of the Latin and vernacular lit­erature of hagiography in the West from its origins to 1500], ed. Guy Philip­part, 4 vols. (Turnhout, 1994-present). The individual articles are in English, French, German, and Italian. Philippart himself has written a thorough study of the etymology and development of the term “hagiography,” see Guy Philip­part, “Hagiographes et hagiographie, hagiologes et hagiologie; des mots et des concepts” [Hagiographers and hagiography, hagiologers and hagiology: concerning words and concepts], Hagiographica 1 (1994): 1-16.

For over three and one-half centuries, the Jesuit members of the Société des Bollandistes [Society of Bollandists], founded by Jean Bollandus (d. 1665), have been at the forefront of hagiographic scholarship. It is they who have edited the single most important collection of hagiographic sources, that is the Acta Sanctorum [Acts of the saints], the first of whose sixty-eight immense folio volumes appeared in 1643. They continue their efforts to this day through the edition of the journal Analecta Bollandiana [Bollandist glean­ings], which contains regular bibliographies and summaries of hagiographic scholarship. Their work is well documented at the site which they maintain on the World Wide Web: http://www.kbr.be/~socboll. Members of this group have compiled and regularly updated the standard guides to the primary sources of hagiography written in the clerical languages of Latin and Greek, as well as those of the Christian East: Bibliotheca hagiographica latina antiquae et mediae aetatis, 3 vols., Subsidia Hagiographica 6 and 70 (Brussels, 1898 and 1986); Bibliotheca hagiographica graeca, third edition (with sup­plement) by Francois Halkin, Subsidia Hagiographica 8 and 65 (Brussels, 1957 and 1984); Bibliotheca hagiographica orientalis, ed. Paul Peeters, Sub­sidia Hagiographica 10 (Brussels, 1910). In these reference works, each hagiographic source is provided a distinct number, and all extant editions of it (as well as important manuscripts in some cases) are listed. In the chapters which follows, every Latin or Greek primary source is identified by its number in the Bibliotheca hagiographica latina or the Bibliotheca hagiographica graeca. Few equivalent standard references yet exist for hagiography written in the vernacular languages, although several important projects to catalog such vernacular literature are currently in process. An exception is Ole Widding, Hans Bekker-Nielsen, and Laurence Shook, “The Lives of the Saints in Old Norse Prose: A Handlist,” Mediaeval Studies 25 (1963): 294-337. Docu­mentation of other projects may be found in the articles of Philippart’s Hagiographies and in recent numbers of the journal Hagiographica. The problems faced in one such project are well described by E. Gordon Whatley in “An Introduction to the Study of English Prose Hagiography: Sources and Resources,” in Holy Men and Holy Women: Old English Prose Saints’ Lives and Their Contexts, ed. Paul Szarmach (Albany, NY, 1996), pp. 3-32. On the same problem, also see Michael Lapidge, “The Saintly Life in Anglo-Saxon England,” in The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature, eds. Mal­colm Godden and Michael Lapidge (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 243-63.

Two useful dictionaries providing information about specific saints are available in English: Donald Attwater, The Penguin Dictionary of Saints (Harmondsworth, 1965) and David Farmer, The Oxford Dictionary of Saints, revised edition (Oxford, 1992). Anglophone readers might also con­sult the volumes of the New Catholic Encyclopedia. Unfortunately the well- known work by Alban Butler entitled The Lives of the Saints (revised edition by Herbert Thurston and Donald Attwater [London, 1926-38; reprint, New York, 1956]) is largely based on secondary sources and is often unreliable. A new revision of Butler’s work currently being undertaken by David Farmer promises more accurate information. For those beginning to undertake seri­ous research into hagiographic sources, further references and bibliography may be found in: Bibliotheca Sanctorum [Library of the saints], eds. Iosepho Vizzini et al., 13 vols. (1961-69); Vies des saints et des bienheureux par les reverends pères bénédictins de Paris [Lives of the saints and of the blessed by the Reverend Benedictine priests of Paris], eds. Jules Baudot, Paul Antin, and Jacques Dubois, 13 vols. (1935-59); Histoire des saints et de la sainteté chrétienne [History of Christian saints and sanctity], eds. André Mandouze, André Vauchez, et al., 11 vols. (Paris, 1986-88). The best guide to the iconog­raphy of symbols associated with the saints available in English is The Bible and the Saints, ed. Gaston Duchet-Suchaux and Michel Pastoureau, trans. David Howell (Paris, 1994). Much more complete is Gertrud Schiller, Ikonographie der christlichen Kunst [Iconography of Christian art], 5 vols. (Gütersloh, 1966-91). For a useful bibliography of works on pilgrimage, consult Linda Kay Davidson and Maryjane Dunn-Wood, Pilgrimage in the Middle Ages: A Research Guide (New York, 1993).

In the decades around 1900, a Bollandist named Hippolyte Delehaye laid the foundations for modern hagiographic scholarship. Although Delehaye wrote in French, his seminal essay on hagiographic method has appeared in two separate English translations, see Legends of the Saints, trans. V.M. Crawford (from the first French edition; London, 1907; reprint, Notre Dame, IN, 1961) and trans. Donald Attwater (from the fourth French edition; New York, 1962). Also available in English is Delehaye’s history of the Bollandist enterprise, see The Work of the Bollandists Through Three Centuries, 1615-1915 (Princeton, 1922). Approaches to the history of medieval Chris­tianity have changed greatly since the time of Delehaye, who was concerned to provide a Catholic response to positivist historicism. One of the most influ­ential works in the development of medieval religious history has recently been translated into English; see Herbert Grundmann, Religious Movements in the Middle Ages, trans. Steven Rowan (German original, 1935; Notre Dame, IN, 1995). For an interesting, but controversial, study of these histori­ographical developments, see John Van Engen, “The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem,” American Historical Review 91 (1986): 519-52.

The formative work in applying these new methodologies in religious his­tory to the subject matter of medieval hagiography was written, ironically enough, by a Czech Marxist. František Graus, Volk, Herrscher und Heiliger im Reich der Merowinger. Studeien zur Hagiographie der Merowingerzeit [People, lords, and saints in the kingdom of the Franks: studies on the hagiog­raphy of the Merovingian period] (Prague, 1965) remains one of the most innovative and important studies of medieval history written in the second half of the twentieth century, although it has lamentably never been translated into English. In essence Graus challenged historians to use the then relatively neglected genres of hagiography to serve as sources for the social history of Western Christianity. That challenge has been taken up explicitly or implicitly by a wide variety of scholars of medieval religion, society, literature, and art over the course of the last three decades. The chapters of this collection bear eloquent witness to the fruits of that scholarship.

Recent studies of medieval hagiography, however, would be almost liter­ally inconceivable were it not for the pioneering work of three magisterial scholars―Peter Brown, André Vauchez, and Caroline Bynum―published ini­tially over the course of the 1970s and 1980s. Peter Brown investigated the function of sanctity as a form of social or political power in the later Roman Empire. He first explored the role of living ascetic saints in the villages of fifth- and sixth-century Syria in “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity,” Journal of Roman Studies 61 (1971): 80-101, which is more eas­ily available as reprinted in a collection of his articles entitled Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (Chicago, 1982), pp. 103-52. He thus coined an important scholarly concept which has influenced virtually all later Anglo­phone scholarship on hagiography―that is “holy man”―through the bril­liantly simple expedient of taking his sources literally. Since the original publication of that article, he has regularly reevaluated his findings in the light of newer scholarship: “The Saint as Exemplar in Late Antiquity,” in Saints and Virtues, ed. John Hawley (Berkeley, 1987), pp. 3-14; “Arbiters of the Holy: The Christian Holy Man in Late Antiquity,” in Peter Brown, Authority and the Sacred (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 55-78; “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity, 1971-1997,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 6 (1998): 353-76. (The autumn number of the Journal of Early Christian Studies for 1998, in which the latter essay appeared, is a special issue, edited by Susanna Elm, devoted to analyses and reconsiderations of the scholarly heritage of Brown’s original article.) Brown also analyzed the posthumous role of saints in The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Chris­tianity (Chicago, 1981), a pathbreaking work on the beginnings of the cult of relics in Western Christendom. Secondly, André Vauchez interrogated the ways in which hagiographic sources themselves were produced and how this process in turn formed ideas of sanctity in La sainteté en Occident aux derniers siècles du moyen âge d’après les procès de canonisation et les docu­ments hagiographiques, Bibliothèque des Ecoles françaises d’Athenes et de Rome 241 (Rome, 1981; second edition, 1987), which has been translated as Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge, 1997). In it Vauchez examined the records of the formal processes initiated for the can­onization of saints between 1198 and 1431 in the hope of illuminating the practices of Western Christianity―and the attempted control of those prac­tices by the papacy―during those centuries. Anglophone readers may garner a sense of his extensive work on related topics from the essays collected in The Laity in the Middle Ages: Religious Beliefs and Devotional Practices (Notre Dame, IN, 1993). Finally, Caroline Bynum highlighted gender as a crucial cat­egory in the analysis of hagiography and sanctity in Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, 1987). She has further explored and deepened her analysis in the articles collected in Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (Boston, 1991).

Much innovative scholarship has appeared on saints and their cults since the publication of Brown’s article on the “holy man.” The following short list includes some of the most significant, listed in chronological order, although it necessarily omits much by including only works in English and emphasizing books over articles: Patrick Geary, Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages (Princeton, 1978; second edition 1990); Jean-Claude Schmitt, The Holy Greyhound: Guinefort, Healer of Children Since the Thirteenth Century (French original, Paris, 1979; Cambridge, 1983); Phyllis Johnson and Brigitte Cazelles, Le vain siècle Guerpir: A Literary Approach to Saint­hood Through Old French Hagiography of the Twelfth Century (Chapel Hill, NC, 1979); Donald Weinstein and Rudolph Bell, Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Latin Christendom, 1000-1700 (Chicago, 1982); Clare Stancliffe, Saint Martin and His Hagiographer: History and Miracle in Sulpicius Severus (Oxford, 1983); Richard Kieckhefer, Unquiet Lives: Fourteenth-Century Saints and Their Religious Milieu (Chicago, 1984); Sherry Reames, Legenda Aurea: A Reexamination of its Paradoxical History (Madison, WI, 1985); Alison Elliott, Roads to Paradise. Reading the Lives of the Early Saints (Hanover, NH, 1987); Thomas Heffernan, Sacred Biography. Saints and Their Biographers in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1988); Susan Ridyard, The Royal Saints of Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge, 1988); David Rollason, Saints and Relics in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 1989); Katrien Heene, “Merovingian and Carolingian Hagiography. Continuity or Change in Public and Aims?” Analecta Bollandiana 107 (1989): 415-28; Jeffrey Hamburger, “The Use of Images in the Pastoral Care of Nuns: the Case of Heinrich Suso and the Dominicans,” Art Bulletin 71 (1989): 20-46; Thomas Head, Hagiog­raphy and the Cult of Saints: The Diocese of Orléans, 800-1200 (Cambridge, 1990); Gabor Klaniczay, The Uses of Supernatural Power: The Transforma­tion of Popular Religion in Medieval and Early-Modern Europe, trans. Susan Singerman (Princeton, 1990); Paul Fouracre, “Merovingian History and Merovingian Historiography,” Past and Present 127 (1990): 3-38; Sharon Farmer, Communities of Saint Martin: Legend and Ritual in Medieval Tours (Ithaca, NY, 1991); Cynthia Hahn, “Picturing the Text: Narrative in the Life of the Saints,” Art History 13 (1990): 1-33; Julia Smith, “Oral and Written: Saints, Miracles, and Relics in Brittany, c. 850-1250,” Speculum 65 (1990): 309-43; Lisa Bitel, Isle of the Saints: Monastic Settlement and Christian Com­munity in Early Ireland (Ithaca, NY, 1991); John Coakley, “Gender and the Authority of Friars: the Significance of Holy Women for Thirteenth-Century Franciscans and Dominicans,” Church History 60 (1991): 445-60; Aviad Kleinberg, Prophets in Their Own Country: Living Saints and the Making of Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages (Chicago, 1992), Dyan Elliott, Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock (Princeton, 1993); Pamela Gehrke, Saint and Scribes: Medieval Hagiography in its Manuscript Context (Berkeley, 1993); Susanna Elm, “Virgins of God": The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 1994); Barbara Abou-el-Haj, The Medieval Cult of Saints: Formations and Transformations (Cambridge, 1994); Michael Goodich, Violence and Miracle in the Fourteenth Century: Private Grief and Public Salvation (Chicago, 1995); Yitzhak Hen, Culture and Religion in Merovingian Gaul, A.D. 481-751 (Leiden, 1995); Julia Smith, “The Problem of Female Sanctity in Carolingian Europe c. 780-920,” Past and Present 146 (1995): 3-37; Amy Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechtild of Magde­burg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart (Notre Dame, IN, 1995); Cyn­thia Hahn, “The Sight of the Saint in the Early Middle Ages: The Construction of Sanctity in Shrines East and West,” Speculum, 72 (1997): 1079-1106; Jane Schulenburg, "Forgetful of Their Sex”: Female Sanctity and Society, ca. 500-1100 (Chicago, 1998).

Also see the articles collected in The Church and Healing, ed. W.J. Sheils, Studies in Church History 19 (Oxford, 1982); Saints and Their Cults, ed. Steven Wilson (Cambridge, 1983); Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe, eds. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Timea Szell (Ithaca, NY, 1991); Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, eds. Daniel Bornstein and Roberto Rusconi (Italian original, 1992; Chicago, 1996); Martyrs and Martyrologies, ed. Diana Wood, Studies in Church History 30 (Oxford, 1993); Cre­ative Women in Medieval and Early Modern Italy: A Religious and Artistic Renaissance, eds. E. Ann Matter and John Coakley (Philadelphia, 1994). Finally, two catalogs of art exhibits which have made particularly interesting use of objects connected to the cult of saints are: The Art of Devotion in the Late Middle Ages in Europe, 1300-1500, ed. Henk van Os (Princeton, 1994) and Memory in the Middle Ages, eds. Nancy Netzer and Virginia Reinburg (Chestnut Hill, MA, 1995).

Notes

  1. Eddius Stephanus, The Life of Bishop Wilfrid by Eddius Stephanus, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave (Cambridge, 1927; reprint 1985), preface, p. 3. Find
  2. In this introduction, I have provided foonotes only to translations of primary sources, in order to cite the source of quoted passages and, more importantly, to pro­vide the reader a number of works in English translation which can serve as useful com­parisons and adjuncts to the present collection. I have adapted some of the essay which follows from articles on “Hagiography” which I have written for two reference works also published, like the present collection, by Garland Press: Medieval France: An Ency­clopedia., eds. William Kibler and Grover Zinn (New York, 1995), pp. 433-37 and Ency­clopedia of Medieval Women, eds. Katherina Wilson and Nadia Margolis (New York, in press). In addition to the printed works below, a large number of hagiographic works are available via the Internet; it should be noted that, due to copyright laws, many of the works thus available are somewhat dated. An extraordinarily useful catalog and guide to these works (including active links to them) is maintained by Paul Halsall on the World Wide Web as “The Internet Medieval Sourcebook: Saints’ Lives” (http://www. fordham.edu/halsall/sbook3.html). Find
  3. The first two volumes in the series Byzantine Saints’ Lives in Translation have appeared: Holy Women of Byzantium: Ten Saints' Lives in English Translation, ed. Alice- Mary Talbot (Washington, D.C., 1996) and Byzantine Defenders of Images: Eight Saints' Lives in English Translation, ed. Alice-Mary Talbot (Washington, D.C., 1998). Some use­ful collections presenting translations of representative works of hagiography from various areas of the Eastern Christian world include: The Life and Times of St. Gregory the Illumi­nator: The Founder and Patron Saint of the Armenian Church, trans. S.C. Malan (London, 1868); The Book of the Saints of the Ethiopian Church: A Translation of the Ethiopic Synaxarium, ed. and trans. E A. Wallis Budge, 4 vols. (Cambridge, 1928); Lives of the Ser­bian Saints, ed. and trans. Voyeslav Yanich and C. Patrick Hankey (London, 1921); John of Ephesus, Lives of the Eastern Saints, ed. and trans. E.W. Brooks, 3 vols., Patrologia ori- entalis 17-19 (Paris, 1923-25); Three Byzantine Saints: Contemporary Biographies, ed. and trans. Elizabeth Dawes and Norman Baynes (Oxford, 1948; reprint, Crestwood, NY, 1977) ; Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, ed. and trans. David Lang, Ethical and Religious Classics of East and West 15 (London, 1956); Holy Women of the Syrian Orient, ed. and trans. Sebastian Brock and Susan Harvey (Berkeley, 1987); The Hagiography of Kievan Rus, ed. and trans. Paul Hollingsworth, Harvard Library of Early Ukranian Litera­ture 2 (Cambridge, MA, 1992). Also, much of the hagiography concerning early asceticism and monasticism listed below in note 5 was written in the Christian East. For a complete listing of translations of Byzantine Greek hagiography into modern languages, see the extremely useful “Survey of Translations of Byzantine Saints’ Lives” maintained online (and regularly updated) by Alice-Mary Talbot at the Dumbarton Oaks site on the World Wide Web (http://www.doaks.org/translives. html). Find
  4. Translations of all “authentic” acts of martyrs (that is those by roughly contempo­rary authors), both Greek and Latin, may be found in The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, ed. Herbert Musurillo (Oxford, 1972). Many other translations exist of several of these texts, such as The Martyrdom of St. Poly carp and The Passion of Sts. Perpetua and Felic­ity. The development of traditions about the martyrs in the Christian West during the later fourth and early fifth century can be seen in The Works of Prudentius, ed. and trans. H.J. Thomson, 2 vols., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA, 1953). Traditions about Chris­tian martyrs were also perserved outside the orthodox Church, see Donatist Martyr Sto­ries: The Church in Conflict in Roman North Africa, ed. and trans. Maureen Tilley, Translated Texts for Historians (Liverpool, 1996). Find
  5. Asceticism itself, of course, predated monasticism and even Christianity. A number of important texts on asceticism in the late antique world (including some that are hagio-graphic) have been collected in Ascetic Behavior in Greco-Roman Antiquity: A Source­book, ed. Vincent Wimbush (Minneapolis, MN 1990). Find
  6. Some fourth- and fifth-century works which record the development of monasti­cism in the Christian East and are available in translation include: Palladius, The Dialogue Concerning the Life of Chrysostom, trans. Herbert Moore (London, 1921) and The Lausiac History, trans. Robert Meyer (Washington, DC, 1964); Gregory of Nyssa, Life of St. Macrina in Ascetical Works, trans. V.W. Callahan (Washington, DC, 1967) or, alterna­tively, The Life of Saint Macrina, trans. Kevin Corrigan (Toronto, 1987; reprint, Toronto, 1997); Pachomian Koinonia, vol. 1: The Life of Saint Pachomius and his Disciples, trans. Armand Veilleux, Cistercian Studies 45 (Kalamazoo, MI, 1980); The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, trans. Benedicta Ward (London, 1975; reprint, New York, 1980); The Lives of the Desert Fathers, trans. Norman Russell, Cistercian Studies 34 (Kalamazoo, MI, 1981); Theodoret of Cyrrhus, A History of the Monks of Syria, trans. R.M. Price, Cistercian Studies 88 (Kalamazoo, MI 1985); The Lives of Simeon Stylites, ed. and trans. Robert Doran, Cistercian Studies 112 (Kalamazoo, MI 1992); Histories of the Monks of Upper Egypt and Life of Paphnutius, trans. Tim Vivian, Cistercian Studies 140 (Kalamazoo, MI, 1993). A useful selection of works of early monastic hagiography from the Christian East is Journeying into God: Seven Early Monastic Lives, ed. and trans. Tim Vivian (Minneapolis, MN, 1996). Find
  7. English translations of a Latin version of the Sayings of the Desert Fathers (see above note) and of John Cassian’s Conferences (which, although not hagiography, did draw deeply on the eastern hagiographic traditions discussed in the above note) may be found in Western Asceticism, ed. and trans. Owen Chadwick, Library of Christian Classics (London and Philadelphia, 1958). Some of the hagiographic works of Jerome may be found in Early Christian Biographies, ed. Roy Deferrari, Fathers of the Church 15 (New York, 1952), pp. 217-97. A fuller selection of Jerome’s hagiography, but in a dated transla­tion, may be found in Jerome, Letters and Select Works, ed. and trans. W.H. Fremantle, et al., Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series 6 (Edinburgh, 1893). Jerome described the lives of many ascetics in his Letters. Works specifically about early female ascetics, from both East and West, have been collected in Handmaids of the Lord: The Lives of Holy Women in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Joan Petersen, Cis­tercian Studies 143 (Kalamazoo, MI, 1996), which includes useful translations of Jerome’s most important letters concerning female ascetics. Find
  8. Augustine, Confessions, Book 8, Sections 15-17. There has been much speculation that Jerome was one of the three anonymous companions of Ponticianus mentioned by Augustine. Find
  9. Ambrose described his discovery of the relics in a letter to his sister (Letter 22) which may be found in Ambrose, Select Works and Letters, ed. and trans. H. de Romestin, Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series 10 (Edinburgh, 1896). Find
  10. Translations of the Lives of Martin, Ambrose, and Augustine may be found in Early Christian Biographies (see note 7 above) and in The Western Fathers, ed. F.R. Hoare (New York, 1954); those of Martin and Augustine appear in updated versions with fuller notes in Soldiers of Christ: Saints’ Lives from Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, eds. Thomas Noble and Thomas Head (University Park, PA, 1995), pp. 1-74. In addition to her translation of the Life of St. Porphyry which appears here, Claudia Rapp is prepar­ing a translation of the Life of St. Epiphanius to be published in the Translated Texts for Historians series published by the University of Liverpool Press. Find
  11. A useful collection of translated texts concerning this process of Christianization is Christianity and Paganism, 350-750: The Conversion of Western Europe, ed. and trans. J.N. Hillgarth, revised ed. (Philadelphia, 1986). Find
  12. An interesting comparison to the episcopal lives written ca. 400 (listed in note 9) might be made to the Lives of bishops in the western Roman provinces during the fifth and first half of the sixth century―such as Honoratus of Arles (d. ca. 430), Germanus of Auxerre (d. 446), Epiphanius of Pavia (d. 496), and Caesarius of Arles (d. 542)―who largely had to deal with barbarian rather than imperial civil authorities: Hilary of Arles, Life of St. Honoratus in The Western Fathers, pp. 247-80; Constantius of Lyon, Life of St. Germanus of Auxerre in Soldiers of Christ, pp. 75-106 (see note 10 above); Ennodius, Life of St. Epiphanius, trans. Genevieve Cook (Washington, D.C., 1942.); Life of St. Caesarius of Arles in Caesarius of Arles: Life, Testament, Letters, ed. and trans. William Klingshirn, Translated Texts for Historians (Liverpool, 1994). Honoratus was abbot of Lérins before becoming bishop of Arles. And one might also examine the Lives of such ascetic saints as Severinus of Noricum (d. 482) and Genofeva (or Genevieve) of Paris (d. ca. 500): Eugip- pius, Life of St. Severinus, trans. George Robinson (Cambridge, MA, 1914) and Life of St. Genofeva in Sainted Women of the Dark Ages, eds. and trans. Jo Ann McNamara and John Halborg, with E. Gordon Whatley (Durham, NC, 1992), pp. 17-37. Find
  13. As quoted in Raymond Van Dam, Saints and Their Miracles in Late Antique Gaul (Princeton, 1993), p. 314. Find
  14. All the hagiographic works of Gregory of Tours have been translated: Life of the Fathers, trans. Edward James, Translated Texts for Historians (Liverpool, 1986); Glory of the Martyrs, trans. Raymond Van Dam, Translated Texts for Historians (Liverpool, 1988); Glory of the Confessors, trans. Raymond Van Dam, Translated Texts for Historians (Liv­erpool, 1988); The Suffering and Miracles of the Martyr St. Julian and The Miracles of the Bishop St. Martin in Van Dam, Saints and Their Miracles (see above note). There are numerous translations available of Gregory the Great’s Dialogues, particularly of the sec­ond book which concerns the life of St. Benedict of Nursia; perhaps the best is that by Odo Zimmerman, The Fathers of the Church 39 (Washington, DC, 1959). Find
  15. Gregory of Tours, Life of the Fathers, p. 27. Find
  16. There are a number of good collections of hagiography in translation from the barbarian kingdoms. For the kingdoms of the Franks, see Sainted Women of the Dark Ages (see note 12 above) and Late Merogingian France: History and Hagiography, 640-720, eds. and trans. Paul Fouracre and Richard Gerberding (Manchester, 1996). For Visigothic Spain, see Lives of the Visigothic Fathers, ed. and trans. A.T. Fear, Translated Texts for Historians (Liverpool, 1997). For the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, see Two Lives of Saint Cuthhert, trans. Bertram Colgrave (Cambridge, 1940; reprint 1985); Anglo-Saxon Saints and Heroes, ed. and trans. Clinton Albertson (New York, 1967); The Age of Bede, ed. and trans. David Farmer (Harmondsworth, 1983); as well as Eddius Stephanus, The Life of Bishop Wilfrid (see note 1 above). In Italy one of the most important hagiographic works of the early Middle Ages was the periodic compiling of the Liber Pontificalis or Lives of the Popes. The earlier sections of this work have appeared in two volumes of the Translated Texts for Historians series (see note 10 above), both translated by Raymond Davis: The Book of Pontiffs (Liber Pontificalis) (Liverpool, 1989) and The Lives of the Eighth-Cen­tury Popes (Liber Pontificalis) (Liverpool, 1992). Find
  17. Much Irish hagiography (both Latin and Celtic) has been translated, but the origi­nals are often difficult to date with precision and the translations from older scholarly works now often sound quite dated: Lives of the Saints from the Book of Lismore, ed. Whitley Stokes (Oxford, 1890); Lives of Irish Saints, ed. and trans. Charles Plummer, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1922); M. A. O’Brien, “The Old Irish Life of St. Brigit,” Irish Historical Studies, 1 (1938-39): 121-34, 343-53; St. Patrick: His Writings and Muirchu's Life, ed. and trans. A.B.E. Hood (Totowa, NJ, 1978); Adomnan, Life of Columba, ed. and trans. Alan Anderson and Marjorie Anderson, second edition (Oxford, 1991); Saint Patrick's World: The Christian Culture of Ireland's Apostolic Ages, ed. and trans. Liam de Paor (Dublin, 1993), which includes Tirechan’s Account of St. Patrick's Journey; Muirchu’s Life of St. Patrick, and Cogitosus’s Life of St. Brigid the Virgin, perhaps the three oldest pieces of hagiography from Ireland. Find
  18. Old English hagiographic poetry, such as Cynewulf’s Juliana and Guthlac, may be found in modern English in many anthologies, including Anglo-Saxon Poetry, ed. and trans. R.K. Gordon (London, 1926 and reprints). Find
  19. Willibald’s Life of St. Boniface in Soldiers of Christ, pp. 107-40 (see note 10 above) and Abbo of Fleury’s Passion of St. Edmund in Corolla Sancti Eadmundi. The Gar­land of St. Edmund, King and Martyr, ed. and trans. Francis Hervey (London, 1907), pp. 8-59. Aelfric’s rendering of Abbo’s work into Old English may be read in modern English in The Anglo-Saxon World: An Anthology, ed. and trans. Kevin Crossley-Holland (Oxford, 1984), pp. 228-34. For other ninth- and tenth-century accounts of martyrdom from the Scandinavian and Slavic lands, see Anskar; the Apostle of the North (801-865): Translated from the Vita Anskarii by Bishop Rimbert, ed. and trans. Charles Robinson (London, 1921) and The Origins of Christianity in Bohemia: Sources and Commentary, ed. and trans. Marvin Kantor (Evanston, IL, 1990). Also of interest is the Life of Otto, Apostle of Pomerania, ed. and trans. Charles Robinson (London, 1929), which traces the career of the German bishop Otto of Bamberg (d. 1139) who worked for decades develop­ing the Christian church in Poland. Find
  20. A direct comparison to Einhard’s text may be found in the selections from Ermen- tarius’s Translation and Miracles of St. Philibert found in The History of Feudalism, ed. David Herlihy (New York, 1970), pp. 1-7. Although no Lives from the Carolingian period are included in this collection, a number of them exist in English translation. Several, such as Alcuin’s Life of St. Willibrord and Rudolf of Fulda’s Life of St. Leoba, may be found in Soldiers of Christ (see note 10 above). Also see, Charlemagne's Cousins. Contemporary Lives of Adalhard and Wala, trans. Allen Cabaniss (Syracuse, 1967), for Lives of two noble courtiers who later became abbots of Corbie; Alcuin, The Bishops, Kings, and Saints of York, ed. and trans. Peter Godman (Oxford, 1982); Rabanus Maurus, The Life of Saint Mary Magdalene and of Her Sister Saint Martha, trans. David Mycoff, Cistercian Studies 108 (Kalamazoo, MI, 1989); The Monks of Redon: The Gesta sanctorum Rotonensium and Vita Conuuoionis, ed. and trans. Caroline Brett (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1989). Although not all technically works of hagiography, the lives of Charlemagne and his family provide excellent comparisons to the works included in the present volume: Two Lives of Charlemagne, ed. Lewis Thorpe (Harmondsworth, 1969); Son of Charlemagne. A Con­temporary Life of Louis the Pious, trans. Allen Cabaniss (Syracuse, 1961). A wealth of use­ful sources on the Carolingian period may be found in Carolingian Civilization: A Reader, ed. Paul Dutton (Peterborough, Ontario, 1993). Find
  21. Three collections of miracle stories made at important shrines―those of St. Faith in Conques, St. James in Compostella, and St. Erkenwald in London―during the eleventh and twelfth centuries have recently appeared in excellent annotated translations: The Book of Sainte Foy, ed. and trans. Pamela Sheingorn (Philadelphia, 1995); The Miracles of Saint James: Translations from the Liber sancti Jacobi, ed. and trans. Thomas Coffey, Linda Kay Davidson, and Maryjane Dunn (New York, 1996); The Miracles of St. Erkenwald in The Saint of London: The Life and Miracles of St. Erkenwald, ed. and trans. E. Gordon What­ley (Binghamton, NY, 1989), pp. 100-165. Find
  22. See, for example, the Lives of monastic leaders, such as Odo of Cluny (d. 942) and Hildegard of Bingen (d. 1179), or of bishops, such as Aethelwold of Winchester (d. 984), Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109), Hugh of Lincoln (d. 1200), and Edmund of Abingdon (d. 1240): St. Odo of Cluny, ed. and trans. Gerard Sitwell (New York, 1958); Gottfried of Dis- ibodenberg and Theodoric of Echternach, The Life of the Saintly Hildegard, trans. Hugh Feiss (Toronto, 1997); Wulfstan of Winchester, The Life of St. Aethelwold, ed. and trans. Michael Lapidge and Michael Winterbottom, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford, 1991); Eadmer of Canterbury, The Life of Saint Anselm Archbishop of Canterbury, ed. and trans. R.W. Southern (London, 1962); Adam of Eynsham, The Life of St. Hugh of Lincoln, ed. and trans. Decima Douie and Hugh Farmer, 2 vols. (London, 1961-62); Matthew Paris, The Life of St. Edmund, trans. C.H. Lawrence (Oxford, 1996). Find
  23. Other examples available in translation include the Lives of King Edward the Confessor of England (d. 1066) and Queen Margaret of Scotland (d. 1093): The Life of King Edward who rests at Westminster; attributed to a Monk of St. Bertin, ed. and trans. Frank Barlow, second edition, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford, 1992) and Turgot, The Life of St. Margaret in Ancient Lives of Scottish Saints, ed. and trans. W.M. Metcalfe (Pais­ley, 1895), pp. 297-321. An interesting comparison can be made to Lives of contemporary kings and queens who were not considered to be saintly, such as that of Queen Emma of England (d. 1052) in Encomium Emmae reginae, ed. and trans. Alistair Campbell, Cam­den Society 3.72 (London, 1949) and those of King Conrad II (d. 1039) and Henry IV (d. 1106) of Germany, both of which are contained in Imperial Lives and Letters of the Eleventh Century, ed. and trans. Theodor Mommsen and Karl Morrison (New York, 1962). Find
  24. Translations of various records of Thomas Becket’s martyrdom and miracles may be found in Edwin Abbott, St. Thomas of Canterbury: His Death and Miracles, 2 vols. (London, 1898); The Life and Death of Thomas Becket, Chancellor of England and Arch­bishop of Canterbury, ed. and trans. George Greenaway (London, 1961). (Edwin Abbott is better known as the author of the novel Flatland.) Find
  25. An excellent comparison can be found in the story of a female hermit (or anchoress) from twelfth-century England, The Life of Christina of Markyate, a Twelfth-Century Recluse, ed. and trans. C.H. Talbot, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford, 1959; reprint, Toronto, 1998). A new and slightly more readable translation is now available in the Visionary Women series by Monica Furlong (Berkhamsted, 1997). Also see the selec­tions from Reginald of Durham’s Life of St. Godric of Finch ale, another English hermit of the twelfth century, which appear in Social Life in Britain from the Conquest to the Refor­mation, ed. and trans. G.G. Coulton (Cambridge, 1918), pp. 415-20. Find
  26. Bernard of Clairvaux: The Story of his Life as Recorded in the Vita prima Bernardi by Certain of his Contemporaries, trans. Geoffrey Webb and Adrian Walker (London, 1960) and Walter Daniel, The Life of Ailred of Rievaulx, ed. and trans. F.M. Powicke (London, 1950). Bernard himself also wrote an important piece of hagiography which well illustrates his attitudes toward the monastic life: The Life and Death of Saint Malachy, the Irishman, trans. Robert Meyer, Cistercian Fathers Series 10 (Kalamazoo, MI, 1978). Find
  27. The oldest known literary document in Old French is in fact a brief hagiographic poem, the Séquence de Ste. Eulalie which dates to about 880. Significant numbers of ver­nacular hagiographic works, however, were not produced until the late eleventh century. They concerned such diverse subjects as St. Leodegar, a seventh-century bishop of Autun; St. Brendan, an Irish missionary; and St. Mary the Egyptian, a prostitute turned hermit. Two collections which contain hagiography written in Romance languages during the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries are The Lady as Saint: A Collection of French Hagio­graphic Romances of the Thirteenth Century, ed. and trans. Brigitte Cazelles (Philadelphia, 1993) and Virgin Lives and Holy Deaths: Two Exemplary Biographies for Anglo-Norman Women, ed. and trans. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne and Glyn Burgess (London, 1996). Find
  28. For translated sources on medieval heresy, see Heresies of the High Middle Ages, ed. and trans. Walter Wakefield and Arthur Evans (New York, 1969); The Birth of Popular Heresy, ed. and trans. R.I. Moore (London, 1976); Heresy and Authority in Medieval Europe, ed. and trans. Edward Peters (Philadelphia, 1980); Other Middle Ages; Witnesses at the Margins of Medieval Society, ed. and trans. Michael Goodich (Philadelphia, 1998). Find
  29. 29 The story of Christina of Markyate―a woman who successfully used a prior vow of virginity to annul her engagement to a man named Burthred which had been forcibly extracted by her parents and later went on to a successful monastic career, first as a hermit and then as prioress of a convent of nuns―provides a poignant comparison to the story of Godelieve. See The Life of Christina of Markyate (see note 23 above). Another interesting comparison to a woman of the contemporary nobility is that provided by the widowed mother of Abbot Guibert of Nogent. The first book of Guibert’s Monodiae is available in several translations: The Autobiography of Guibert, Abbot of Nogent-sous-Coucy, trans. C.C. Swinton Bland (London, 1926); Self and Society in Medieval France: The Memoirs of Abbot Guibert of Nogent, ed. and trans. John Benton (New York, 1970; reprint, Toronto, 1984); A Monk's Confession: The Memoirs of Guibert of Nogent, trans. Paul Archambault (University Park, PA, 1996). Find
  30. For an interesting collection of translated documents concerning the relations between Jews and Christians, see Church, State, and Jew in the Middle Ages, ed. and trans. Robert Chazan (New York, 1980). Find
  31. The hagiographic traditions surrounding St. Francis of Assisi have appeared in numerous translations, but the most comprehensive collection remains St. Francis of Assisi: Omnibus of Sources, ed. Marion Habig (Chicago, 1973). A similar collection of contemporary documents both by and about Francis’s disciple Clare is to be found in Clare of Assisi: Early Documents, ed. and trans. Regis Armstrong (New York, 1988). Other examples of mendicant hagiography include: The Life of Saint Thomas Aquinas: Bio­graphical Documents, ed. and trans. Kenelm Foster (London, 1959); Saint Dominic: Bio­graphical Documents, ed. and trans. Francis Lehner (Washington, DC, 1964); Consolation of the Blessed, ed. Elizabeth Petroff (New York, 1979); Raymond of Capua, The Life of Catherine of Siena, trans. Conleth Kearns (Wilmington, DE, 1980); Early Dominicans: Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Simon Tugwell (New York, 1982). Find
  32. A number of the Lives of thirteenth-century-Flemish holy women have appeared through the Peregrina Translation Series: Thomas of Cantimpré, The Life of Christina Mirabilis, trans. Margot King (Toronto, 1986); Thomas of Cantimpré, The Life of Lutgard of Aywières, trans. Margot King (Toronto, 1991); Thomas of Cantimpré, The Life of Mar­garet of Ypres, trans. Margot King, second edition (Toronto, 1996); Jacques de Vitry, The Life of Marie d’Oignies, trans. Margot King, fourth edition (Toronto, 1998); The Life of Blessed Juliana of Mont-Cornillon, trans. Barbara Newman (Toronto, no date). For more on the activities of this publishing house, which does much to promote scholarship about the female saints of the Middle Ages, see their World Wide Web site at http://www.pereg- rina.com/index.html. Find
  33. Many of these works are available in English translation (particularly through the efforts of the Cistercian Studies Series of Cistercian Publications and the Classics of West­ern Spirituality Series of Paulist Press). Some good examples include: Gertrud of Helfta (d. 1302), Spiritual Exercises, trans. Gertrud Jaron Lewis and Jack Lewis (Kalamazoo, MI, 1989); Angela of Foligno (d. 1309), The Complete Works, ed. and trans. Paul Lachance (New York, 1993); Catherine of Siena (d. 1380), The Dialogue of Divine Providence, trans. and ed. Suzanne Noffke (New York, 1980). A particularly valuable collection of selections from sources concerning female sanctity may be found in Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature, ed. Elizabeth Petroff (Oxford, 1986). It contains selections from con­temporary works both about and by holy women, that is both hagiography and auto­hagiography. Although the collection begins in the early Christian period, it focuses on the later Middle Ages. Also see the earliest piece of English autobiography, the Book of Margery Kempe (ca. 1438), which records the process by which its author tried, and largely failed, to become accepted as a holy woman by her community. It is available in several modern English versions, the best being that by Barry Windeatt (Harmondsworth, 1986). Find
  34. One of the formative cases of papal canonization concerned Gilbert of Sempringham (d. 1189). The documents concerning this case have been collected and translated in The Book of St. Gilbert, eds. and trans. Gillian Keir and Raymonde Foreville, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford, 1987). Other examples of canonization processes available in En­glish translation include those held concerning St. Dominic in 1233 (in Early Dominicans [see note 31 above], pp. 66-85) and St. Clare in 1253 (in Clare of Assisi [see note 31 above], pp.125-75). Find
  35. A fifteenth-century pilgrim to the Holy Land by the name of Felix Fabri, who was an Italian Dominican, left a detailed and delightful account of his voyages, which have been summarized with much commentary and direct translation in Hilda Prescott, Friar Felix at Large: A Fifteenth-Century Pilgrimage to the Holy Land (New Haven, CT, 1950) and Once to Sinai: The Further Pilgrimage of Friar Felix Fabri (New York, 1958). English translations of most extant medieval accounts of pilgrimage to the Holy Land, from the fourth through the fifteenth centuries, are available in the thirteen volumes of “The Library of the Palestine Pilgrims’ Text Society.” The translations, while useful, are somewhat pon­derous and dated (notably that of Felix Fabri’s account, for which Prescott is a more enter­taining, and usually reliable, source). Find
  36. An excellent English translation is available of this extremely important text: Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1993). Two, slightly earlier, collections of exemplary stories have been translated into English: Jacques de Vitry, The Exempla or Illustrative Stories from the Sermones vulgares of Jacques de Vitry, ed. and trans. Thomas Crane (London, 1890) and Caesarius of Heisterbach, The Dialogue on Miracles, trans. H.V.E. Scott and C.C. Swinton Bland, 2 vols. (London, 1929). An imperfect sense of late medieval preaching may be obtained from the extracts translated in Medieval Sermon-Stories, ed. and trans. Dana Munro, Translations and Reprints from the Original Sources of European History 2.4 (Philadelphia, 1901) and Bernardino of Siena, Sermons, ed. Nazareno Orlandi, trans. Helen Robins (Siena, 1920). For two excellent collections of translated documents which illustrate the practice of Christianity in late medieval England, both the efforts of the clergy at educating the laity and the response of those laypeople, see Catholic England: Faith, Religion and Observance Before the Reformation, ed. and trans. R.N. Swanson, Manches­ter Medieval Sources (Manchester, 1993) and Pastors and the Care of Souls in Medieval England, eds. John Shinners and William Dohar, Notre Dame Texts in Medieval Culture 4 (Notre Dame, IN, 1998). Find
  37. Relatively little of this prodigious output has been translated into modern English, but examples do exist for several languages. For Old French, see the texts collected in The Lady as Saint (see note 27 above). For Italian, see The Life of Saint Mary Magdalen, trans. Valentina Hawtrey (London, 1904). For Middle English, see Birger Gregersson and Thomas Gascoigne, The Life of Birgitta of Sweden, trans. by Julia Bolton Holloway (Toronto, 1991); A Legend of Holy Women. A Translation of Osbern Bokenham’s Leg­ends of Holy Women, ed. and trans. Sheila Delany, Notre Dame Texts in Medieval Culture 1 (Notre Dame, IN, 1993); Medieval English Prose for Women: Selections from the Katherine Group and Ancrene Wisse, ed. and trans. Bella Millett and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (Oxford, 1990). Find
  38. As translated by Brigitte Cazelles in The Lady as Saint, p. 102 (see note 27 above). Find
  39. Some sense of the literature intended to inform late medieval preachers about the traditions surrounding the Virgin Mary and Christ may be obtained from Evelyn Under­hill, The Miracles of Our Lady Saint Mary (London, 1905); Johann Herolt, Miracles of the Blessed Virgin Mary, trans. C.C. Swinton Bland (London, 1928); Mary Bodenstedt, The Vita Christi of Ludolphus the Carthusian (Washington, DC, 1944); Meditations on the Life of Christ: An Illustrated Manuscript of the Fourteenth Century, ed. and trans. Ira Ragusa and Rosalie Green (Princeton, 1961); Praying the Life of Christ: The Prayers Con­cluding the 181 Chapters of the Vita Christi of Ludolphus the Carthusian, trans. Mary Bodenstedt, Analecta Cartusiana 15 (Salzburg, 1973). Find
  40. Some sense of the critiques leveled against traditional religious practice may be gleaned from the texts collected in Culture and Belief in Europe, 1450-1600: An Anthol­ogy of Sources, ed. and trans. David Englander, Diana Norman, Rosemary O’Day, and W.R. Owens (Oxford, 1990), section 1. Find