37-476: The Passio Albani , or Passion of Saint Alban , is medieval hagiographic text about the martyrdom of Saint Alban , the protomartyr of Roman Britain. The author is anonymous, but the work is thought to have been written in the sixth or fifth century. In the latter case, it may actually have been authored or commissioned by Germanus of Auxerre . It currently survives in three different recensions and six separate manuscripts located throughout Europe, and forms
74-424: A pejorative reference to biographies and histories whose authors are perceived to be uncritical or excessively reverential toward their subject. Hagiography constituted an important literary genre in the early Christian church , providing some informational history along with the more inspirational stories and legends . A hagiographic account of an individual saint could consist of a biography ( vita ),
111-556: A description of the saint's deeds or miracles, an account of the saint's martyrdom ( passio ), or be a combination of these. The genre of lives of the saints first came into being in the Roman Empire as legends about Christian martyrs were recorded. The dates of their deaths formed the basis of martyrologies . In the 4th century, there were three main types of catalogs of lives of the saints: The earliest lives of saints focused on desert fathers who lived as ascetics from
148-560: A largely illiterate audience. Hagiography provided priests and theologians with classical handbooks in a form that allowed them the rhetorical tools necessary to present their faith through the example of the saints' lives. Of all the English hagiographers no one was more prolific nor so aware of the importance of the genre as Abbot Ælfric of Eynsham . His work Lives of the Saints contains set of sermons on saints' days, formerly observed by
185-598: A way of explaining where the acta (or story of the martyrdom) of an already well known figure, came from. In any case what seems clear is that Germanus wanted to identify the cult firmly with continental orthodoxy as a part of his campaign against the Pelagian heresy in Britain. Hagiographic A hagiography ( / ˌ h æ ɡ i ˈ ɒ ɡ r ə f i / ; from Ancient Greek ἅγιος , hagios 'holy' and -γραφία , -graphia 'writing')
222-432: Is a biography of a saint or an ecclesiastical leader, as well as, by extension, an adulatory and idealized biography of a preacher, priest, founder, saint, monk, nun or icon in any of the world's religions. Early Christian hagiographies might consist of a biography or vita (from Latin vita , life, which begins the title of most medieval biographies), a description of the saint's deeds or miracles, an account of
259-644: The Church of Scientology is commonly described as a heavily fictionalized hagiography. Nick Higham (historian) Nicholas John Higham FSA (born 1951) is a British archaeologist , historian, and academic. He was Professor of Early Medieval and Landscape History at the University of Manchester , and is now an emeritus professor . Higham was trained as an archaeologist at Manchester, receiving his Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in 1977. He taught at Manchester from 1977 to 2011. This article about
296-604: The Cornish-language works Beunans Meriasek and Beunans Ke , about the lives of Saints Meriasek and Kea , respectively. Other examples of hagiographies from England include: Ireland is notable in its rich hagiographical tradition, and for the large amount of material which was produced during the Middle Ages. Irish hagiographers wrote primarily in Latin while some of the later saint's lives were written in
333-567: The Ge'ez language are known as gadl (Saint's Life). There are some 200 hagiographies about indigenous saints. They are among the most important Medieval Ethiopian written sources, and some have accurate historical information. They are written by the disciples of the saints. Some were written a long time after the death of a saint, but others were written not long after the saint's demise. Fragments from an Old Nubian hagiography of Saint Michael are extant. Jewish hagiographic writings are common in
370-526: The Martyrology of Tallaght and the Félire Óengusso . Such hagiographical calendars were important in establishing lists of native Irish saints, in imitation of continental calendars. In the 10th century, a Byzantine monk Simeon Metaphrastes was the first one to change the genre of lives of the saints into something different, giving it a moralizing and panegyrical character. His catalog of lives of
407-437: The 16th. Production remained dynamic and kept pace with scholarly developments in historical biographical writing until 1925, when Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (d. 1938) placed an interdiction on Ṣūfī brotherhoods. As Turkey relaxed legal restrictions on Islamic practice in the 1950s and the 1980s, Ṣūfīs returned to publishing hagiography, a trend which continues in the 21st century. The pseudobiography of L. Ron Hubbard compiled by
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#1732779644843444-518: The 4th century onwards. The life of Anthony of Egypt is usually considered the first example of this new genre of Christian biography. In Western Europe , hagiography was one of the more important vehicles for the study of inspirational history during the Middle Ages . The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine compiled a great deal of medieval hagiographic material, with a strong emphasis on miracle tales. Lives were often written to promote
481-542: The British Library , Gray's Inn London, Autun France, and Einsiedeln Switzerland. Meyer identified the T or Turin manuscript as the oldest version of the Passio , and the basis for all other recensions. He believed it was produced at the end of the eighth century at Corbie . Meyer did not believe that the original version of the Passio , the one set down by Germanus on tituli, had survived, and he assumed that
518-628: The English Church. The text comprises two prefaces, one in Latin and one in Old English , and 39 lives beginning on 25 December with the nativity of Christ and ending with three texts to which no saints' days are attached. The text spans the entire year and describes the lives of many saints, both English and continental, and harks back to some of the earliest saints of the early church. There are two known instances where saint's lives were adapted into vernacular plays in Britain. These are
555-609: The Roman period into the Anglo-Saxon period and beyond. While the E text of the Passio says only that Alban was martyred tempore persecutionis ," in the time of the persecution," the T text says that Alban was martyred during the reign of Severus, and that Alban was tried by a Caesar. This led some historians to suggest that the martyrdom occurred at the time of the Emperor Severus although other scholars pointed out that
592-475: The Sikh Janamsakhis ) concerning saints, gurus and other individuals believed to be imbued with sacred power. Hagiographic works, especially those of the Middle Ages , can incorporate a record of institutional and local history , and evidence of popular cults , customs, and traditions . However, when referring to modern, non-ecclesiastical works, the term hagiography is often used today as
629-609: The T version was therefore the oldest and most accurate version of the lost original. He postulated that the Turin manuscript was later abridged to form text E, which was then redacted to form the Paris text. This led him to assume that the E version was merely an abridgment of the Turin manuscript, and he edited it only in an abridged form as part of his 1904 survey. Meyer's view was the standard interpretation for nearly 100 years, which had major implications in how later historians interpreted
666-470: The account of Alban's martyrdom. According to the 'T 'version, Alban came to Germanus in a dream, revealing the details of his martyrdom. When Germanus awoke, he had the tale set down on tituli , possibly engraved onto painted illustrations of the martyrdom. This account set down by Germanus has been thought to be the first copy of the Passio Albani : the E version (minus the few concluding lines about
703-496: The basis for all subsequent retellings of the Saint Alban martyrdom, from Gildas to Bede . The Passio has survived in six separate manuscripts located throughout Europe. In 1904, The German scholar W. Meyer identified three different recensions of the manuscript, which he named T, P, and E. The T manuscript is located in Turin, the P manuscript in Paris, and the E manuscripts, of which there are four copies, are located at
740-793: The case of Talmudic and Kabbalistic writings and later in the Hasidic movement. Hagiography in Islam began in the Arabic language with biographical writing about the Prophet Muhammad in the 8th century CE, a tradition known as sīra . From about the 10th century CE, a genre generally known as manāqib also emerged, which comprised biographies of the imams ( madhāhib ) who founded different schools of Islamic thought ( madhhab ) about shariʿa , and of Ṣūfī saints . Over time, hagiography about Ṣūfīs and their miracles came to predominate in
777-532: The cult of local or national states, and in particular to develop pilgrimages to visit relics . The bronze Gniezno Doors of Gniezno Cathedral in Poland are the only Romanesque doors in Europe to feature the life of a saint. The life of Saint Adalbert of Prague , who is buried in the cathedral, is shown in 18 scenes, probably based on a lost illuminated copy of one of his Lives. The Bollandist Society continues
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#1732779644843814-522: The genre of manāqib . Likewise influenced by early Islamic research into hadiths and other biographical information about the Prophet, Persian scholars began writing Persian hagiography , again mainly of Sūfī saints, in the eleventh century CE. The Islamicisation of the Turkish regions led to the development of Turkish biographies of saints, beginning in the 13th century CE and gaining pace around
851-512: The hagiographer's native vernacular Irish . Of particular note are the lives of St. Patrick , St. Columba (Latin)/Colum Cille (Irish) and St. Brigit/Brigid —Ireland's three patron saints. The earliest extant Life was written by Cogitosus . Additionally, several Irish calendars relating to the feastdays of Christian saints (sometimes called martyrologies or feastologies ) contained abbreviated synopses of saint's lives, which were compiled from many different sources. Notable examples include
888-402: The hero-warrior figure, but with the distinction that the saint is of a spiritual sort. Imitation of the life of Christ was then the benchmark against which saints were measured, and imitation of the lives of saints was the benchmark against which the general population measured itself. In Anglo-Saxon and medieval England, hagiography became a literary genre par excellence for the teaching of
925-417: The historicity of Saint Alban and dated his martyrdom. It wasn't until 2001 that Richard Sharpe examined the E manuscripts and argued that the Turin manuscript is probably not the oldest version after all, and was instead probably composed in the ninth or tenth century at Saint Maur-des-Fossés . Not taking into account Meyer's main argument, Sharpe tried to demonstrate that the E recension is in fact older, and
962-553: The martyr's passion on the walls of a basilica, actually at Auxerre This was a practice known to happen in 5th- and 6th-century churches, most notably in the collection from Tours known as the Martinellus . Throughout the 20th century most scholarship related to Saint Alban tended to focus on determining the date and location of Alban's martyrdom, and implicitly assumed that Alban was an authentic historical figure whose cult developed shortly after his martyrdom and continued on from
999-486: The original life stories of their first saints, e.g. Boris and Gleb , Theodosius Pechersky etc. In the 16th century, Metropolitan Macarius expanded the list of the Russian saints and supervised the compiling process of their life stories. They would all be compiled in the so-called Velikiye chet'yi-minei catalog (Великие Четьи-Минеи, or Great Menaion Reader ), consisting of 12 volumes in accordance with each month of
1036-527: The parent text of all both the T and P texts. The original author or commissioner of the Passio is thought by historians to be Germanus of Auxerre , though this cannot be proven with certainty, and his name is not recorded as the author of any of the recensions. We know from the Vita Germani and Prosper of Aquitaine that Germanus visited the tomb of Saint Alban in 429. All versions of the Passio , meanwhile, include some details about this visit, after
1073-405: The popular heroic poem, such as Beowulf , one finds that they share certain common features. In Beowulf , the titular character battles against Grendel and his mother , while the saint, such as Athanasius ' Anthony (one of the original sources for the hagiographic motif) or the character of Guthlac , battles against figures no less substantial in a spiritual sense. Both genres then focus on
1110-404: The reference to that Emperor looked like an interpolation and that the original version probably only referred to a iudex . This was confirmed by Sharpe's 2001 article which argued for the E version as the most original. More recently scholars have been more skeptical about the historicity of Saint Alban. In 2009 Professor Ian Wood (followed subsequently by Michael Garcia) suggested that the cult
1147-732: The saint's martyrdom (called a passio ), or be a combination of these. Christian hagiographies focus on the lives, and notably the miracles , ascribed to men and women canonized by the Roman Catholic church , the Eastern Orthodox Church , the Oriental Orthodox churches , and the Church of the East . Other religious traditions such as Buddhism , Hinduism , Taoism , Islam , Sikhism and Jainism also create and maintain hagiographical texts (such as
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1184-517: The saints became the standard for all of the Western and Eastern hagiographers, who would create relative biographies and images of the ideal saints by gradually departing from the real facts of their lives. Over the years, the genre of lives of the saints had absorbed a number of narrative plots and poetic images (often, of pre-Christian origin, such as dragon fighting etc.), mediaeval parables , short stories and anecdotes . The genre of lives of
1221-643: The saints was introduced in the Slavic world in the Bulgarian Empire in the late 9th and early 10th century, where the first original hagiographies were produced on Cyril and Methodius , Clement of Ohrid and Naum of Preslav . Eventually the Bulgarians brought this genre to Kievan Rus' together with writing and also in translations from the Greek language. In the 11th century, they began to compile
1258-438: The study, academic assembly, appraisal and publication of materials relating to the lives of Christian saints (see Acta Sanctorum ). Many of the important hagiographical texts composed in medieval England were written in the vernacular dialect Anglo-Norman . With the introduction of Latin literature into England in the 7th and 8th centuries the genre of the life of the saint grew increasingly popular. When one contrasts it to
1295-483: The visit of Germanus to the martyr's tomb), convincingly argued by Professor Sharpe to be not only the shortest and simplest of the recensions but also the oldest This cannot be proved but it is almost certain that this Passio , very likely the source of all our information about Saint Alban, originated within the circle of Germanus at Auxerre. Some historians have argued that this short 'E version/ account of Alban's martyrdom could have been written beneath illustrations of
1332-511: The year. They were revised and expanded by St. Dimitry of Rostov in 1684–1705. The Life of Alexander Nevsky was a particularly notable hagiographic work of the era. Today, the works in the genre of lives of the saints represent a valuable historical source and reflection of different social ideas, world outlook and aesthetic concepts of the past. The Oriental Orthodox Churches also have their own hagiographic traditions. For instance, Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church hagiographies in
1369-411: Was actually an 'invention' of Saint Germanus of Auxerre, although this has been disputed by, for instance, Professor Nick Higham . Crucial to the debate is the passage from the T text which describes the appearance of saint Alban to Germanus in a dream. This can be interpreted as implying that the identity of the martyr was unknown before it was revealed to Germanus but it can also be interpreted as simply
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