Welcome and Comments on Saints: Studies in Hagiography

Hello,

Welcome to Hagiagraphy, a blog where I write about my readings on the topic of saints and musings on hagiographical theory.  As some Greek-savvy readers may have guessed, the name refers to my focus on female saints, as well as my continuing interest in gender and religion.

For this first post, I'm writing about selected essays in the book Saints: Studies in Hagiography, ed. Sandro Sticca and published by Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies in 1996.  The book arose from a Binghamtom University conference on 'The Cult of the Saints', a reference/homage to Peter Brown's classic of the same name (Brown himself has no articles in the book). Though the entire book seems quite promising, because of a project I'm working on I'm concentrating on a few articles and the volume's preface.

From the volume, I recommend "Imitatio Helenae: Sainthood as an Attribute of Queenship" by Jo Ann McNamara, and "Saint Francis, a Saint in Progress" by Chiara Frugoni. The first is an analysis of Christian queens/empresses from Helena, Constantine's mother, all the way to one of my favorite saints, Elizabeth of Hungary, the 13th century princess/landgravine (or duchess) of Hungary.  The second traces, through art and literature, how treatment of Francis' stigmata changed.  It seems that Bonaventure places more emphasis on the stigmata than earlier writers.  I'm not entirely convinced by Frugoni's argument, but it definitely makes for fascinating reading. I would recommend Patrick Geary's piece, "Saints, Scholars, and Society: The Elusive Goal" but it appears to have been taken from Geary's earlier book Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages, with only slight modifications. 

The preface, by the editor,  is a 'state of the field' sort of piece, one with an elegaic tone of lost promises  and unfulfilled potential.   Sticca sets up a dichotomy between those historians who scorn hagiography and those striving to unlock the troves of material in the (mostly) unexamined hagiographical corpus.  Perhaps following the lead of a disappointed Geary, who characterizes research on the topic as 'disappointing', Sticca posits that this volume can actually reach a new pinnacle of hagiographic study, at long last distancing the modern scholar from the Bollandists' (a group of Jesuit scholars dedicated to compiling critical versions of saints' lives or vitae) deep concern for truth in the sources.  Appropriately praising the Bollandists' work and that of Hippolyte Delahaye, publisher of Essai sur le culte des saints dans l'antique and  perhaps the most famous of their number, the preface ends with suggestions for the future of the field.  

I always read introductions or prefaces to collections of articles or essays.  They provide an enlightening angle into the circumstances of composition, the issues on the table at the time of publication/writing, summarize the books' content, and help to situate the reader in the appropriate intellectual milieu.  In works on hagiography, introductions are also useful for pointing to what kind of approach the book will take to the 'truth issue'.  I often find that scholarly approaches to facticity in this context fall roughly into two camps, perhaps best visualized as along a continuum  The first, a rather out-of-date approach, is that saints' lives should be treated like silt in a Gold Rush riverbed, sifted until valuable nuggets of historical fact emerge.   The other, influenced by a post-modern aesthetic, is that because all of history is arbitrarily constructed and the product of subjective academic decisions, there is no reason to distinguish hagiography from history.  Michel de Certeau, the historian also of fan studies fame, is a sterling example of this perspective. In this introduction, Sticca is clearly aligning himself and the writers in the volume with the latter camp, choosing to use vitae to illuminate the surrounding society and religious context.  Saints' memory reveal the matrices of power and circumstances in which they are constructed.   

I find the second approach, saints as windows into history, primarily useful because it allows me to escape the panning operations that can tie scholars up into knots.  Trying to discern which parts of a vita are 'authentic' and directly from the saint as opposed to inserted by the hagiographer seems to be a mostly futile process.   I approach saints' lives in a manner similar to the Bible - the book as we have it, the [NT] textus receptus, is sanctified by church tradition if not by originality.  That is, whether or not we have what Jesus actually said, we do have what the church believed he said.  Likewise, saints' lives show what was thought about them, whether or not that 'actually happened'.  The perceived religious truth of their existence ultimately trumps the factual truth, to borrow another approach from Biblical studies. 

The main problem with seeing the saints as windows/mirrors of their circumstances  is one of aesthetics.  It deprives saints' lives of their status as literary productions, read for devotional purposes and perhaps even as stories, with plot and narrative and excitement (what creative self-harm will they come up with next??).  Reading them purely to learn about the circumstances of production minimizes this aspect is fundamentally selective, and reduces the saints to functional objects.  Essentially, though I am definitely still thinking this through, saints' lives should be read as literature, but with a few important exceptions. The sacred character of their composition as well as the elements of propaganda should be carefully noted.   Saints' lives were at least partially intended to convince the audience of the subject's holiness - these vitae are serious business for the hagiographer. As such, the vitae  should be read in their totality with an eye (or I suppose many eyes-go team Revelation!) toward all of these concerns. Really, part of the fun of vitae is their amenability towards all kinds of analysis.