The contributions collected in this intriguing little book share the common feature of looking at hagiographical texts precisely as such--that is, as texts. Their narrative structures and shapes, the models that their authors followed or contributed to establish, and especially the roles played by the characters--both main and secondary--in the stories are the key perspectives around which textual analysis is brought on. The chronological and geographical coverage of the volume is ambitious to say the least. Both Western and Byzantine, Latin and Greek hagiographical traditions are considered on a long period stretching from Late Antiquity to the fifteenth century. Considering the relatively low number of total pages (182, including indexes), one may think that certain contexts inevitably prevail on others in the contents of the volume, which is partially true. Yet scholars working on hagiographical texts from any area and period, from second-century Northern Africa to Carolingian Europe, to fourteenth-century Constantinople (and so on), will take at least some advantage from the case studies investigated in the individual contributions. The shared focus on the narrative construction of saints as heroes and heroines and their interactions with the other characters included in the texts is usually just the starting point for broader considerations of the ways in which the authors negotiated their positioning within previous literary traditions, sometimes fundamentally reinventing or repurposing them. The fluidity of the textual “genres” (Lives, Passions, collections of miracles, translations, etc.) usually established by modern scholars is highlighted to the point that the boundaries distinguishing one genre from another often appear extremely blurred. So this book is cast along a range of studies that, from the vantage point provided by medieval hagiographical texts, assesses how limited the very helpfulness of the category of literary genre is for analyzing and understanding them.
In his introduction, Koen De Temmerman, one of the editors of the book, draws a concise but straightforward history of scholarly approaches to hagiographical texts from the Bollandists to the present. In this narrative, a key turn was established in the 1990s by Marc van Uytfanghe’s consideration of hagiography not as a genre but as discourse. [1] On the one hand, this opened the way to wider investigations of the circulation and fruition of texts, but, on the other, it resulted in a shift of focus from their literary features to the historical and cultural contexts in which their authors worked. The point of this volume’s editors is that new light on texts as literary products can be cast, for instance, by means of the idea of saints as Christian hero(in)es. As the protagonists of their narratives, saints could be shaped as entertaining or exemplary figures, or both. The intricacy and multiplicity of the actual configurations taken by saints as narrative heroes and heroines can provide helpful materials for investigating hagiographers’ scopes and methods of work.
For its breadth and richness, the contribution by Stephanos Efthymiadis about the relationships between saints and secondary characters in Byzantine hagiography can be seen as the book’s second introduction. A clear pattern opposing a protagonist (a saint) and an antagonist was established in hagiography since late antiquity in narratives of martyrdom (“an emotional account” [34]), thus shaping the very idea of the narrative celebration of Christian saints for the following centuries. Even in the saints’ lives, the hero or heroine frequently operates together with or in opposition to other characters or obstacles. Friends, relatives, political opponents, and other woes can be given just as much narrative space and action as the--purported--protagonists, sometimes deserving sub-plots of their own. The more powerful and wicked their opponents, the more astounding and praiseworthy are the saints’ struggles to overcome their challenges. Relationships of intimacy, grounded on shared experiences, can be established and highlighted between saints and secondary heroes: “[w]hen both the names of the individuals in a martyred couple appear in the title [...] the emphasis is, more often than not, on the perennial bond that has led them to suffer a joint heroic end” (42). Late antique and medieval Byzantine hagiography shows somewhat surprising resonances with modern romance in its pursuit of “entertaining edification” (50).
Sabine Fialon highlights the contribution of encomiastic traditions in the hagiographical production of North Africa in late antiquity. Hagiographers reshaped the key features of pre-Christian eulogy, both public and private, and made it one of the literary tools supporting the cult of saints and the spread of the Christian faith. To the same extent to which it was not the saints who performed miracles, but God supernaturally operating in the world by the means of saints, “[d]e fait, pour nos hagiographes, le texte est louange de Dieu, louange de l’Église; on ne loue le saint que parce que Dieu l’a choisi et a combattu en lui ou à ses côtés” (60). The qualities and virtues highlighted in the eulogies of Roman men and women, such as the ability to speak in public (for men) and to transcend the limits of their gender (for women), were not entirely set aside but rather repurposed and integrated within Christian hagiographical praises. “En définitive, si certaines Passions africaines sont, pour leurs auteurs, des louanges, si elles en reprennent parfois la structure, elles ne sont jamais que des louanges” (73).
Anne Alwis’s contribution focuses on the rewriting of female martyrs’ passions and the reconfiguration of their protagonists from virgins to effective orators. The Byzantine texts analyzed by Alwis, (re)written in different times, show the recurrence of a range of narrative motives that don’t highlight the sexual(ized) sides of tortures and executions on the martyrs’ bodies but rather describe them as public speakers who can stand pagan authorities’ arguments and achieve conversions by means of words--instead of miracles. Alwis’s interest in the political purposes of these texts and the goals pursued by their authors, who chose narratives of female passions to depict somehow ironically the times in which they were living, stands as exceptional in the frame of the volume.
As boasting as this may look, Piet Gerbrandy is probably right when he labels Notker Balbulus’s Life of Saint Gallus, an extremely complicated mixture of prose and verse, as “one of the stranger texts in the history of Latin literature” (105). In an exercise of a post-modern approach to an early medieval text, Gerbrandy tries to cast some light on this narrative riddle by deploying categories developed by twentieth-century literary critics, such as iconicity, failure, repetitiousness, and so on. Notker and the fellow monks who helped him in the “exhausting occupation” of writing down one more Life of their patron saint knew that their enterprise was most probably doomed to fail, but, as Gerbrandy suggests, they turned failure into a chance to showcase all their rhetorical skills and had lots of fun while doing it.
In her comparison of three Byzantine collections of lives of the Desert Fathers (fourth to sixth centuries), Markéta Kulhánková isolates a theatre of recurring characters playing different roles and being sketched in different narrative ways. By focusing on women, penitent sinners, and desert fathers themselves, Kulhánková underlines both commonalities and differences between the collections and their authors’ textual practices. The balance between words and deeds, individual and collective actions, and primary and secondary characters is carefully chosen according to specific needs, even though all the texts shared a common purpose of edification of their audience--probably not just to ascetic life but to Christian living as a whole.
As highlighted by Christian Høgel in his paper, doctor saints were a highly peculiar category of heroic Christian figures. Operating healing miracles was part of their everyday practice and a result of their education in medical science. How could they ever be seen as saints whose supernatural deeds were performed not by them, but by God through them? What is more, doctor saints were also compensated with money for their professional activity. “The Christian community clearly felt a need to show its ability to include, and in some cases also to surpass, the acknowledged field of (pagan) physicians, including by marking out the sainthood of some Christian doctors” (143). These saints’ miracles were thus grounded upon their special relationship with God, instead of their professional training--actually, in some cases, doctors performed miracles despite it. The issue of money was tackled by hagiographers through the motif of doctor saints as anargyroi, the moneyless, refusing to accept payments when healing people.
In the final contribution, Virginia Burrus focuses on the multiple narrative afterlives of Constantina, daughter of the emperor Constantine, a saint and especially a character recalled in many texts with different roles and degrees of centrality. A game of “performative intertextuality” (164) can be detected not only between a text and another but also within individual texts. For instance, the author of the Life of Constantina includes, or rather invents, an exchange of letters between the saint and one of her relatives who agrees to take her contribution to the development of the community of female ascetics presided over by Constantina. “Constantina’s performance is, then, simultaneously a textual expansion, a virginal seduction, and a triumph of rhetorical and theological virtuosity” (165).
Even though the book lacks concluding remarks, common strands and general contributions to the understanding of hagiographical production as a whole are apparent throughout the collected papers. The usual consideration of hagiographical texts as mainly (if not solely) edifying literature aiming to convey messages of moral Christian improvement is in many ways shaken or at least enriched with the idea that hagiography could also be entertaining, both for authors and their audiences. The interdisciplinary approach so fruitfully developed in all the papers, mixing sociology, literary criticism, history, and other disciplines, provides more evidence supporting the need to look at hagiographical texts from a number of different perspectives. Some papers probably deserved more pages to further develop their authors’ ideas and arguments. In some cases, the bibliographical references could have been richer. The absence of references to the studies by Monique Goullet on rewritings in Western hagiography is especially striking, as they could provide grounds for helpful comparison. [2] Yet these lacunae are largely compensated by the methodological considerations that most often underpin the individual papers and drive their authors’ analyses. Scholars working on hagiography and its heroes and heroines know they can be fun, much like present-day narratives of (super)heroes and heroines. This book establishes some firm points to better understand how and why they also could be fun to those enjoying them in the Middle Ages.
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Notes:
1. See, for instance, M. van Uytfanghe, “L’hagiographie: un ‘genre’ chrétien ou antique tardif?,” Analecta Bollandiana 111 (1993): 135-188; van Uytfanghe, “Le culte des saints et la prétendue ‘Aufklärung’ carolingienne,” in Le culte des saints au IXe-XIIIe siècles: Actes du Colloque tenu à Poitiers les 15-16-17 septembre 1993, ed. R. Favreau (Poitiers: 1995), 51-166; van Uytfanghe, “La formation du langage hagiographique en Occident latin,” Cassiodorus 5 (1999): 143-169.
2. See especially M. Goullet, Écriture et réécriture hagiographiques: Essai sur les réécritures de Vies de saints dans l’Occident latin médiéval (VIIIe-XIIIe siècle), Hagiologia, 4 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005).