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hagiography

Definition of hagiography

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Like biography and autograph , the word hagiography has to do with the written word. The combining form - graphy comes from Greek graphein, meaning "to write." Hagio - comes from a Greek word that means "saintly" or "holy." This origin is seen in Hagiographa , the Greek designation of the Ketuvim , the third part of the Jewish Scriptures. English's hagiography, though it can refer to biography of actual saints, is these days more often applied to biography that treats ordinary human subjects as if they were saints.

Examples of hagiography in a Sentence

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'hagiography.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

see hagiographa

1821, in the meaning defined at sense 1

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“Hagiography.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hagiography. Accessed 14 May. 2024.

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Article Contents

(a parabolic) introduction, reconceiving hagiography: why and how, from texts to media, from products to processes, conclusion: parareligious and interreligious implications.

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Hagiography Unbound: A Theory of Making and Using Holy Media

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Aaron T Hollander, Hagiography Unbound: A Theory of Making and Using Holy Media, Journal of the American Academy of Religion , Volume 89, Issue 1, March 2021, Pages 72–102, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfab009

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Hagiography is a scholarly category that has been used primarily to group textual sources that represent the lives of Christian saints. This article contends that the utility of hagiography and hagiographical far exceeds this commonplace usage, in terms of both the ways they entail broadly enacted cultural dynamics and their applicability beyond conventional disciplinary expectations of what constitutes representations of saints (or even religious content). The article provides a retheorization along two analytic vectors: (1) framing hagiography in terms of a field of many interconnected media rather than identifying it with texts alone, and (2) studying it in terms of the psychosocial processes (imagination, representation, and appropriation) that generate and mobilize understandings of holiness in the world rather than limiting it to the products that instantiate but do not exhaust these processes.

“A marvelous work and a wonder we undertake, an edifice awry we sink plumb and straighten, a great Lie we abolish, a great error correct, with the rule, sword, and broom of Truth!” ( Kushner 2013 , 66). With these portentous words, a disembodied voice fills the stage of Tony Kushner’s theatrical masterpiece, Angels in America , announcing to its AIDS-stricken protagonist that he is to be the prophetic agent of an unspecified “great work.” As the play continues into its second part, the character of Prior Walter undergoes a metamorphosis from a defiant but frightened young man, overwhelmed by the disintegration of his body and his relationships, to a “prophet” whose struggle against the disease is increasingly figured as a biblical wrestling with the angel of death and an all-consuming advocacy for humanity against the powers of a heartless, hopeless heaven. Prior’s witness to the corrosive costs of the “edifice awry,” an American society closed in fear and disgust against its own most vulnerable, stands as an icon of “more life” ( Kushner 2013 , 278–79, 290): life lived to the fullest in the midst of personal, political, even existential fragmentation. The play is a work of fiction, in many ways a work of fantasy, yet it has played no small role in the very real cultural shift since 1991 in attitudes and behaviors around sexuality, disease, and hope in the face of medical and political failures to protect the marginalized ( Butler and Kois 2018 , 399–411). Its arresting combination of religious symbol-systems with raw depictions of biological realities usually kept at a distance from the theater has earned the play its place among the most interpreted and most influential works of drama in the past century.

Why begin with a meditation on Angels in America (hereafter Angels ) in an article promising to be a work of scholarly theory about hagiography? I do so to signal, providing what I hope can serve as a clear example up front, that my goal is to rethink hagiography in a comprehensive way—not throwing out the Lives of the saints and other classic instances of hagiographical narration, but reconceiving what hagiography is by foregrounding what hagiography does in a way unrestricted by conventional suppositions of literary genre and religious authority.

Etymologically, the term hagiography means the “inscription” (- graphia ) of something designated, by somebody, as “holy” ( hagio- ); the powers and limits of this etymology will be unpacked in the next section. But let it suffice at the outset to say that, if hagiography is that which inscribes holiness (or figures things/places/people as holy), it does not hold up as a category for delimiting texts of a given genre, medium, or mode of religious authorization—and not only because holiness is itself an “unstable and treacherous” ( Orsi 2011 , 91) category with an overburdened history in the study of religion. 1 If we look closely at something described as hagiographical by its users (for instance, an image so designated by Orthodox Christians), we will find that it shares definitive qualities and patterns of use with phenomena that they would not typically call hagiographical. If in turn we examine these qualities and patterns, heuristically disentangling the dynamics by which human beings construct, inscribe, and mediate that which they experience or understand to be holy, and if we trace such holy-making effects beyond the usual objects in which they are seen to be concentrated, we will find that these dynamics function in people’s lives in ways that are unanticipated as well as ways that are carefully cultivated. Hagiography in this capacious sense is fixed neither by authorial intention nor private devotion; it “open[s] a crack in the givenness of the social world” ( Orsi 2011 , 90). So then, to say that a work such as Angels evinces “hagiographical” dynamics: what specifically does this mean, and what do we gain by saying so?

Angels is subtitled “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes”: “fantasia,” from the Greek phantasia , meaning “imagination.” The narrative of the play is driven by imaginative associations, layered atop one another such that events taking place in a historical key can simultaneously take place and be perceived (by those with the eyes to see) in a spiritual or metaphysical mode. The play presents these two modalities together, declining to adjudicate between them (for instance, not determining whether Prior’s angelic visions are hallucinations caused by strong medication or are prophetic glimpses of a spiritual otherworld breaking into our own). It is this double-seeing that results so effectively in Prior’s configuration as a holy figure, uncannily estranged from the world in which his body and his society are failing him, even as he must advocate for that world among the heavenly powers. This may be the clearest example of what pervades Angels more broadly: what I would call (and will theorize as) hagiographical imagination , an affective sensibility of thinness between the visible and invisible worlds, where certain extraordinary beings move in the margins and where, as the character of Ethel Rosenberg memorably puts it, “History is about to crack wide open” ( Kushner 2013 , 118).

So too, demonstrably hagiographical tropes and symbols abound in the representational strategies of the play. Representing the AIDS crisis in language evocative of biblical passages concerned with the marginalization of lepers and of medieval despair in the face of plague and pestilence, Kushner renders a metaphorical field that imbues perception of the present with a new ethical and theological amplitude—as the ancient Christian martyr-narratives, among many other media, imbued their own situation of political calamity with the imaginative voltage of spiritual combat and cosmic victory. Saintly representation (unconventional though it is) is also a driving dynamic of the narrative. Belize, the hospital nurse and drag queen who is tasked with caring emotionally for the play’s other protagonists and physically for the play’s cruelest figure, Roy Cohn, is described only sarcastically (but significantly) as a “Christian martyr” in the first half of Angels ( Kushner 2013 , 65). In the second half, however, Belize’s ascetic ordeal—offering the man he hates life-extending counsel, ministering to him in his last terrifying days, and ultimately forgiving him and praying over his body ( Kushner 2013 , 154–55, 264–67)—clearly marks Belize as the bearer of what Isaac of Nineveh would have called “a merciful heart,” the representation of which is configured to be morally and spiritually edifying (as the classic hagiographical traditions would describe it) to those who witness it and appropriate its significance in their own lives. 2

Finally, it is in the domain of such appropriation (or indeed, the more theologically laden “edification”) that it is fruitful to consider Angels on the wavelength of its hagiographical qualities. Kushner’s play has been frequently acclaimed for its influence, both in the lives of “young queer people [given the chance to see] their lives reflected honestly on stage for the first time” ( Schnelbach 2018 ) and in the broader zeitgeist, as a life-giving, life-affirming light of alterity (what one critic describes in resonantly hagiographical terms as “aspirational fantasy”— Butler and Kois 2018 , 396) shining out within the Reagan era and its “sense of mounting catastrophe” ( Butler and Kois 2018 , 10). Angels not only draws on the Fountain of Bethesda (John 5:1–9; cf. Kushner 2013 , 289–90) as a symbol of miraculous healing for those abandoned by society, but it also strives to be a metaphorical Bethesda of its own: an imaginative haven in which the hopeless can gather to await a rupture in the status quo, and a prophetic reminder that the world could be worse than it is even as it yearns to be invaded by something new, something other, something that restores the broken to wholeness—what is called among other names the holy . So doing, the play interrupts the political world within which it mediates its vision—whether it serves as a fountainhead of resilience and conviction that death-dealing forces will not have the last word, or whether it serves to concentrate or entrench resistance to that which it represents. 3 As a phenomenon, Angels must be understood inclusive of its appropriation by and reconfiguration of the society to which it is addressed.

I have introduced my theorization of hagiography with a work that is not typically (if ever) considered hagiographical, because this miniature analysis off the beaten track helps to establish the stakes of what follows. Hagiography is a concept that was, until recently, primarily theorized in scholarship pertaining to specific Christian sources: sources that purport to represent the lives of holy people for the sake of instructing a Christian community or providing a partisan religious interpretation of public events. Hagiography functioned as a synonym or at least the chief identifying adjective ( hagiographical ) for Christian “writing about the saints and their miraculous powers” ( Bartlett 2013 , 504), which extended in popular and accessible fashion the devotion owed to some holy person, becoming enormously popular in late antiquity and the Middle Ages before (so it is regularly presumed) falling off in credibility with the rise of modern historical epistemology. 4 This commonplace notion that hagiographical sources are the product of a prerational or at least a credulous community of believers is not accidental—as it is not accidental that the colloquial use of the term implies that a "hagiographical" account of an event or person falsifies through excessive praise. 5 The scholarly category of hagiography came into being as a distinction among those attempting to thresh out the scientific value of documents whose content could no longer be categorized as historical because of its miraculous reporting or its plainly incorrect geographical or chronological accounting. 6 The standard definition, then, would seem to contrast hagiography with history , at once warranting “scientific” scrutiny of the former by the latter and fixing scholarly attention on the written word as the site where hagiography takes place. And this standard definition has been roundly deconstructed—most compellingly by Felice Lifshitz, who shows that the literary category hagiography goes up in smoke once its nineteenth-century invention and deployment as part of the rise of positivistic historiography (by the Belgian Jesuit Société des Bollandists , among others) is revealed ( Lifshitz 1994 , 98–102; cf. Delehaye 1934 , 7–17). 7

Yet, Lifshitz’s critique of hagiography as a cross-temporal and cross-cultural literary genre (which I accept in most respects and to which I will return) only undermines the treatment of hagiography as a fixed body of data (into which particular objects either fall or do not) and does not oblige the abandonment of hagiography as an analytic category. Another solution is possible when we trouble not only the presumed opposition between hagiography and history but also the restriction of hagiographical as a valid descriptor only for specific genres (typically, Lives , passion accounts, or miracle collections) or specific media (typically, written texts). 8 By unrestricting hagiography in these ways, we may abolish our anxieties over how to define it according to form, content, and historical merit (or lack thereof) and instead recover a productive use of the concept focusing on how hagiography works and what it does (even when the borders of what is included remain blurry and these dynamics change from context to context, tradition to tradition).

Although the theory that follows is grounded in my own research on the history of Christianity (Greek Orthodoxy especially), and its positive claims are limited to the ways that the study of Christian (and Christianity-entangled) media is enhanced by theorizing the psychosocial processes that generate and mobilize hagiographical products, this demonstrated applicability in one field does not preclude the framework’s resonance and provocation more broadly. Such an approach to hagiography—unbound by form and content, and as attentive to social processes as to the material products that precipitate from them—is indeed resonant with the emerging, collaborative scholarly project of comparative hagiology . In a recent special issue of Religions (“Comparative Hagiology: Issues in Theory and Method”), the contributors tackle the specific question of the comparative and cross-cultural applicability of hagiography in light of the term’s historical association with positivist scholarship and with Christian normativity. 9 Responding to the various critiques of the category in the last decades, these scholars treat hagiography less as a thing in the world and more as a strategy of scholarly interpretation, by which to carry out assessment of the rhetorics and practices by which a given community “construct[s] and promote[s] the recognition of a given individual as a perfected being in the context of a particular religious theory of truth” ( Rondolino 2019 , 2).

However, in this article, I take a somewhat different tack, suggesting that hagiography is indeed a thing in the world—albeit a different sort of thing than it is normally purported to be. A relevant and clarifying (though certainly not exact) analogy would be with those many things we reference under the category of cartography . Cartography, the practice or theory of mapmaking, is a thing in the world, something that people do in order to guide the perception and behavior of others (or themselves), even if they call what they are doing by many different names, and even if the various products that result from this doing are culturally specific and non-overlapping. Maps can be of any medium or style, they can be made for private or public consumption, they can be made by institutionally authorized or unauthorized producers, and they can have all kinds of functions (ranging from aesthetic pleasure to lifesaving utility)—functions that may or may not correspond with what their users actually do with them. The products of cartographical practices (like those of hagiographical processes) are not only material objects but also ideas, discourses, and behaviors. 10 Maps made in one time period and cultural context may be radically different (though rarely categorically unrelatable) to those made in another, and there can be reasonable disagreement as to what should count as a map (versus, say, a work of art) or whether a given object of unknown function is or is not map-like. Yet—and I suggest that this is the case with hagiography as well—it is unreasonable to take these many instabilities and diversities as justification for denying that cartography really happens, as a certain kind of (historically and culturally instantiated) human work in the world.

Cartography figures space for imaginative digestion irrespective of the physical status of the space being represented. 11 Likewise, it is crucial to what follows that the functioning of hagiography neither presupposes nor rules out the independent reality of the holiness that it renders for people. Such reality is not verifiable apart from other holy-making and holy-naming practices, even as it remains a lived fact in people’s experience—shaping their perceptions, motivating their actions, and transforming their bodies, minds, and worlds (see Orsi 2011 , 86, 91). In other words, the ambiguity that persists as to whether hagiography constructs holiness (making something holy for someone, making holiness as a social fact), or whether it provides access to the “really real” ( Orsi 2011 , 85) holiness of a saintly or divine figure, does not need to be adjudicated by (this) theory. Holiness is “a made thing” ( Orsi 2011 , 98), whether or not it exists independently of the media and mediating practices by which it is rendered. 12

Cartography is not the map; it is the mapmaking. It is something that is recorded in the map but happens in the labor of the mapmaker and is variably valued and persuasive in the mapmaker’s society. I submit that hagiography is also not identical to the objects it produces; it is constituted, rather, by the holy-mediating processes (psychological, social, material) that result in these objects and their patterns of use. Where I will push beyond the analogy is to propose that hagiography also happens among the consumers of holy media, in the ways that these media are appropriated and put to work in people’s lives.

Massimo Rondolino, who recovered for contemporary use the term “comparative hagiology” ( Rondolino 2017 , 1–18; cf. MacCulloch 1908 ) and has to date been its most active promoter as an intellectual framework, shares my gravitation to “hagiographical process” and has written more extensively on it, offering this as an inclusive term for the authorial strategies and institutional agendas “underpinning the creation and circulation of saintly narratives as they can be historically and philologically discerned in distinct religious, cultural, geographical, and historical contexts” ( Rondolino 2017 , 1; cf. 12–17). Rondolino’s method likewise decenters holy figures themselves as the main site of interpretation, instead uplifting “the hagiographical process [as] the tertium comparationis that allows us to compare [multiple] narrative traditions … and their respective historical and cultural contexts” ( Rondolino 2017 , 20; cf. 17, 135). His approach, treating hagiography primarily as a heuristic tool for scholars to link strategies and politics in diverse contexts, provides Rondolino with the means for drawing comparative insights while avoiding universalizing methods. My own sense of hagiographical process is resonant with Rondolino’s, but it diverges in that the dynamics I highlight as constitutive of hagiography are neither limited to (though they include) the creation and circulation of saintly narratives nor necessarily (though they are often) authorized or even acknowledged by religious institutions. Hagiography, here, is no less psychological than it is political, no less “tactical” than it is “strategic,” and no less an event for the “consumers” than it is for the “producers” (in the schemata made famous by Michel de Certeau [1984 ]) of holy media. Yet, on the whole, my approach is thoroughly compatible with Rondolino’s insofar as it recalibrates the analysis of hagiographical products and processes in terms of functions rather than regularities of form or content. 13

It is this focus on function, after all, that is easily but mistakenly discarded in the course of deconstructing such early twentieth-century hagiographical scholarship as that of Hippolyte Deleheye and his fellow Bollandists. 14 We need not lose the core insight when we accept a critique of its corollaries—even as the conception of hagiographical function will be, in what follows, updated to comprise not only authorial intentions but also a medium’s enticement to private and public use. And if we suppose that the open-ended function of a given text (rather than its given representational form or specific contents) is what gives it hagiographical status, the following thought experiment becomes productive. Suppose there are two otherwise-identical documents narrating the life of a saint, representing in the same words the same sequence of events—one written on the terms of the author’s religious conviction and for the religious benefit of an audience, and the other written, say, as a scribal exercise, with no attention paid by the copyist to the content and promptly burned for kindling (that is, not read and reflected on by anybody: the first would become hagiographical and the second would not. Yet, if that scribal exercise were not consigned to the flames but instead retrieved by a pilgrim who invested it with holy significance (for instance, as embodying the extraordinary virtue of the community that created it) and maintained it for the benefit of self or others, it would be no less hagiographical an object than the first document. Hagiography, according to this logic, is not the narrative per se but the event of mediation between authors and audiences (or, put more capaciously, between producers and consumers, which are typically if not inevitably overlapping categories). As will become clearer below, media that are not intended to be hagiographical by their producers may nonetheless become hagiographical (and do hagiographical work) through their appropriation and use by consumers, who thereby co-produce the hagiographical work irrespective of the original generating impulse. 15

In what remains, I will take two argumentative steps beyond the disjuncture of (Christian) hagiography from genre. 16 First, I will show that not only specific genres of literature but also literature in general can be considered only exemplary, rather than definitive, of hagiographical mediation. That is, it remains correct to refer to the authors of the Lives of the saints as “hagiographers”—and it is no less correct to classify as hagiographers the painters of icons, the builders of reliquaries, and even, in a special sense, the devotees who “inscribe” their own practices into the shared textures and lifeways of the public sphere (by venerating icons or relics, contributing to the currents of processions and festivities, leaving votives of various kinds in holy places, and so forth). In this respect, scholarship on hagiography is justified in turning attention from texts alone to an unbounded (and overlapping) field of multiple media in which experiences or understandings of holiness are inscribed. 17 Second, my theorization is aligned with the fruitful efforts of scholars such as Derek Krueger (2004) , Massimo Rondolino (2017) , and Angie Heo (2018) to foreground authorial subjectivities and political efficacy in the study of hagiographical sources, presupposing that the material products of hagiography cannot be adequately interpreted as static but should rather be viewed in the course of being produced and consumed by particular people in particular settings. Recognizing these products as media, in other words, requires that we treat them as such—as extended in space and time between the people and institutions that make use of them as “communicative vehicles” ( Heo 2018 , 16). I will return, then, to the argument that hagiography is constituted primarily not in the various objects to which we so often turn our attention but, rather, in the multiple psychosocial processes because of which and by means of which these products are created and mobilized in the social world, processes that particular media crystallize in material, transmittable form (but which these media never exhaust). 18

As Lifshitz has shown, the classic Bollandist definition of hagiography as literature inspired by and intended to promote devotion to the saints is untenable—since not all writings about saints are connected with a definite cult, nor are other kinds of writing necessarily less committed to devotional cultivation ( 1994 , 96–97). But this critique, useful for exposing the limits of conceptualizing hagiography as a single genre that crosses contexts and eras, does not at all diminish the existence or significance of the hagiographical functions themselves (functions such as, and not limited to, glorifying the object of representation, increasing devotion to a religious ideal or institution crystallized in the holy figure in question, building up and benefitting the life of a community by way of the representation, and so forth).

Moreover, and crucially, not one of these functions (that which is done in and by hagiography) is carried out only by texts, 19 and even such texts themselves are not purely textual but rather are constituted in multisensory contexts and interwoven with social matrices of action (cf. Gell 1998 , 5–7; Elsner 2015 , 17–18). 20 A saint’s Life (to take the most conventional example) may be produced according the social and spiritual rhythms of a monastic working day, and it may be heard publicly during a festival or read privately in the course of a pilgrimage (see Hart 1992 , 202–11; Krueger 1999 , 219–25). Or, it may be fragmented and excerpted to generate canons and prayers, whose means of mediation are textual but also inclusive of (and included in) the larger liturgical mise-en-scène in the setting of which they are recited: architecture, choreography, images, sounds, smells, interpersonal proximity.

This principle also holds in reverse: inscriptions of holiness that are typically assumed to be extra-verbal are actually not so, not only because they are constantly being interpretively digested in terms of the discursive repertoires available to individuals and traditions, but also because they are always indexed alongside and in relation to a field of signs that are not enclosed by their medium (see Mitchell 2015 , 130–31; Heo 2018 , 16–18). An example from my own field of research: icons in an Orthodox church are covered in words (including names, prayers, and scriptural references) that add discursive texture to the figures represented therein, and they are experienced in the thick of liturgical contexts that are abundantly verbal. These contexts suffuse the ears and nose no less than the eyes with sensory associations, and such icons are encountered also through haptic practices (such as proskynēsis , bowing and kissing the representation of a holy person) that engrain for activation by bodily habits a range of discursive and emotional dispositions toward the saints. In other words, as W. J. T. Mitchell demonstrates, all media are “mixed media” or “multimedia” insofar as, in being created and encountered, each “already entails some mixture of sensory, perceptual, and semiotic elements” ( Mitchell 2015 , 125–33). This is a key principle for reconstruing hagiographical products as media rather than as texts alone; the category of media encompasses all the multifaceted syntheses of materiality and meaning that serve as (in Marshall McLuhan’s famous terms) “the extensions of man” ( McLuhan 1964 , 3), whose “psychic and social consequences” (4) are as much a part of these technologies as the materiality of which they are composed (cf. Williams 1977 , 158–62).

However, to acknowledge the multimediation of media as such is not to reject textuality or narrative, which matter enormously to hagiographical dynamics. 21 Clifford Geertz, for all the outmoded entailments of his social thought, is quite right to observe:

The great virtue of the extension of the notion of text beyond things written on paper or carved into stone is that it trains attention on precisely this phenomenon: on how the inscription of action is brought about, what its vehicles are and how they work, and on what the fixation of meaning from the flow of events—history from what happened, thought from thinking, culture from behavior—implies for sociological interpretation. ( Geertz 1980 , 31, emphasis mine; cf. Ricoeur 1981 , 197–221)

There are, of course, cogent critiques of the hermeneutical habit of textualizing non-textual objects of interpretation (for instance in Sullivan 1990 ; Asad 1993 ; Gell 1998 ; Malafouris 2013 ), but it is important not to let these critiques blind us to the ways that religious communities and the traditions with which their experiences are shaped rely on texts and narratives as root metaphors or interpretive skeleton keys. This is not only, but certainly not least, the case with regard to the peculiarly verbal character of Christian theological frameworks and thus the emic power of this exact hermeneutical habit. 22

Are we risking analytic flabbiness by taking up a concept that has been treated conventionally with a more specific meaning and expanding it to include a broader array of meanings? This is Lifshitz’s specific concern:

To the argument that ‘hagiographical’ materials also include relics, reliquaries, iconographic representations, breviaries, etc., I would respond that, logically, we are therefore also required to erect a genre ‘politicalia’ comprised of biographies of politicians, reports of office-holders to constituents, campaign posters, bumper stickers, and souvenir sponges. ( 1994 , 97n10)

The analogy with “politicalia,” though meant as an absurdum , is actually not far off what I am proposing; where I differ is in what I take to be the intellectual merits of the move if it is made carefully. Sticking with Lifshitz’s analogy, it is not that I take political biographies to belong to the same “genre,” nor to offer an identical function or effect as souvenir sponges. However, I do hold that accounting for the interwoven production and consumption of these many different kinds of media (and for the mutually reinforcing uses to which they are put within a single political field) both improves our repertoire for interpreting the biographical narratives (which our analyses easily but erroneously isolate as autonomous) and reveals the significant and underappreciated political role played by apparent marginalia (like bumper stickers). Thus too with hagiography: needing to add specificity to our uses of the category (as in “hagiographical literature,” “hagiographical hymns,” “hagiographical images,” or indeed “hagiographical practices”) is a small price to pay for greater clarity on the dynamic interconnectivity of these media and the psychosocial processes in which they emerge and take effect.

To understand material or discursive products as media is to recognize that they are not discrete objects. What distinguishes media from mere stuff is that they are enmeshed in processes of production and consumption that constitute them only as extended over time and between constituencies. 23 As Mitchell puts it: “Absolutely anything can become a medium, but that does not mean that everything is functioning as a medium all the time” ( 2017 , 14). Thinly sliced trees marked with mineral pigments are not media; what makes manuscripts media is that they are dynamic rather than static, that their materiality is written and read, encoded and decoded with agency and within a topography of meaning, “translated” or “consumed” into social practices (see Hall 1993 , 90–91). Media are alive insofar as they co-create the social world of which they are a part (see Gell 1998 , 6; Heo 2018 , 19–20).

Recognizing hagiographical products as media, then, involves a kind of double seeing, observing them not only in themselves (their sensory ratios, their internal logic, and their material poetics) but also in terms of the psychosocial processes that are the conditions of their possibility, processes by which these products are generated and according to which such products make their mark as inscriptions of the social world (cf. Rondolino 2019 , 6). Of such processes, I would identify three as most useful for interpreting hagiographical media within and around the history of Christianity: imagination , representation , and appropriation . 24 Imagining holiness, Christians have called its representatives to mind and framed these in meaningful relation to their own contexts of thought and life, thus rendering themselves able to perceive and treat holy media as such, as imperative for their lives. Representing holiness, they have enunciated their understanding in culturally configured discourse and diverse media—including their own bodies and social practices. Appropriating holiness, they have cultivated private and public relations with hagiographical media and memory, resulting in changed patterns of understanding, identity, and behavior.

The interrelation of these hagiographical processes can best be established by beginning not at the logically prior process of imagination, without which neither representation nor appropriation is possible, but with representation, the point at which hagiography is most overtly and recognizably encountered. The inscription of a holy person/place/thing involves the proposition (and acceptance) of something as a substitute for something else; such substitution makes an absent entity present, temporally and spatially, in a way that it would not otherwise be (see Prendergast 2000 , 4–5; J. Webb 2009 , 2–4, 8; Sheppard 2014 , 2–6). The saint is not identical to the representation of the saint; the latter stands in for the former, more frequently in the sense of serving as a stimulus to the mind to lay hold of someone who is (apparently) absent, but also occasionally in the sense of acting on a saint’s behalf, manifesting their power to intercede, or enacting their supposed resistance to hostile entities (for instance, in stories of holy images striking would-be thieves dumb or lame). The representation of holiness, then, can and often will involve some delegation of the role of what is being mediated to the media themselves.

To represent is also to simulate something by means of something else—it is a metaphorical linkage, a living relationship in which both the object represented and that which is used to represent it are changed by their asserted association with the other. 25 Such simulation is, at the same time, an act of imitation—an imitation that requires assembling an imaginative model of the object of mediation such that this model may be copied by a hagiographical producer or indeed by a hagiographical consumer into the material modalities of any number of mediating options (including one’s own bodily conduct). 26

To be able to represent holiness in any of these ways, however, requires a preexisting understanding gained through others’ mediation. It is at this point that we must pivot back to imagination, the process of forming virtual representations in the mind from the apprehension and reconstitution of external stimuli. Imagination is logically prior to and practically entailed in representation not only because the deliberate representation of something requires some conception of what is to be represented, but also because representation is not self-fulfilling. One thing does not make another thing present unless it can be imagined that the former is in some way sufficient to stand in for the latter. This imagination may be enacted either on the part of those deliberately “encoding” something as a representation of something else or on the part of those “decoding” a medium (even a medium with no human author, like a stain on a wall or a pattern in a slice of toast) according to their own frameworks of understanding (see again Hall 1993 , 90–91; cf. J. Webb 2009 , 10). As Mitchell interprets Ernst Gombrich, the “innocent eye” is blind—it is the mind that sees ( Mitchell 2015 , 132; cf. Gombritch 2000 , 296–301, 301). 27

Hagiographical media can only be produced by way of an imagination of holiness that shapes the poetics of representation, but they can also only be recognized as hagiographical (that is, as mediating or ascribing holiness rather than something else) by the imaginative “quasi-seeing” that affixes such media within a topography of meaning (see Miller 2009 , 9, 101; Glaeser 2011b , 6; R. Webb 2009 , throughout). In other words, the material culture of hagiographical representation is (like all material culture) inseparable from intellectual culture and discursive practice. The materiality of hagiographical media depends for its configuration on the meaningfulness that precipitates in the process of imagination.

Imagination, conventionally speaking, refers to the generation of images in the mind—either those by which the mind synthesizes and represents to itself what has previously been perceived (calling to mind the image of one’s first bicycle), or those that generate an image of something that has not been perceived but which is conceivable in quasi-perceptual forms that rely on a sensual repertoire as a point of reference (calling to mind the image of a blue bumblebee the size of a house). 28 Yet it is worth considering whether such imagination also involves an inscription (metaphorically speaking): the inscription of external stimuli “in” the mind, which stores them up as memories and retains them as available for reproduction and reuse. Sources from Greek philosophy that have been enormously influential for religious epistemology, both within and well beyond Christianity, would have it thus—“so deeply does sight engrave [ enegrapsen ] on the mind images [ eikonas ] of actions that are seen.” 29 The metaphor of engraving or inscribing ( graphein ) as the basis for imagination is an indication that the imagination of holiness might itself be considered “hagio-graphical,” whether or not a material product is subsequently generated, in the sense that the imagination depends on the inscription of the mind by what is mediated to it in a myriad of ways.

When the Neoplatonists (and the early Christian theologians who relied on them) recalibrated Aristotle’s theory of the imagination, they moved beyond the notion of the passive wax tablet into which external stimuli are inscribed. The generation of images in the mind now became an active extension of the mind toward the object of its apprehension, seeking to absorb it into itself and so generate it anew: imagination as a production in the self of that which the senses apprehend (see Miller 2009 , 7–15; Sheppard 2014 , 7). This view of imagination would be enormously influential on modern hermeneutics, but it also is the prerequisite for the late antique theorization of the mediation of holiness, which involves the inner transformation of those who encounter the media of sainthood by way of an imaginative digestion of holiness, where holiness becomes part of the mind’s repertoire for perceiving and intervening in the world. 30 The consequence of such imaginative digestion of hagiographical representations is what I am designating as appropriation , considering it not only in the general terms of social hermeneutics but also as enacted (as far as Christianity is concerned) in the influential concept of edification : a “building up” or fortification of a particular subjectivity (inclusive of that subject’s political relationality) by the appropriation of representations of holiness, with the result that it is experienced (or promoted by authorities) as beneficial. 31 As Robert Orsi puts it (without naming edification directly but implying its effects): “The holy marks those who have experienced it. … It becomes the pivot of social and personal narrative” ( 2011 , 103). We have noted the “imperative force” ( Wyschogrod 1990 , 3, 6) of hagiography, but we must also consider its formative facticity: how does hagiography actually shape and orient human lives and human institutions? In J. L. Austin’s terms ( Austin 1975 , 110; cf. Ricoeur 1981 , 197–203), we need to investigate not only what is done in hagiography, but also what is done by hagiography.

The prototypical Christian discussions of edification can be found in the letters of Paul, where “building up” ( oikodomein ) functions as a metaphor for the transformation of souls and societies by the gospel, thus strengthening and shoring up the holy community against error, vice, and cultural (indeed cosmic) threat. 32 But for our purposes, it is useful to note that (for Paul) edification by the gospel is not a given—the gospel must first be mediated and appropriated in a loving way. Imitating/representing Christ crucified, Paul mediates holiness to his communities; 33 “receiving” or “taking hold of” ( dexamenoi ) what is represented to them (including Paul himself), those communities become capable of representing Christ in themselves and to others, mediating holiness onward before the face of the world. 34 But this is only possible if they themselves as a community are edified by what they receive, that is, if they do not merely embrace the gospel for their own selfish benefit (metaphorically represented as building on the foundation of Christ with hay or straw) but rather use it as mortar for continuing to “build up” the steadfast temple of God (1 Corinthians 3:10–17). 35

So far, however, we are still considering edification in terms of its (intended, asserted, or theoretical) effects in a particular tradition, rather than drawing out the psychosocial process by which those effects might be precipitated. To take up the challenge of the latter, we can look more closely at the hermeneutics of appropriation, by which publicly available understandings are not only perceptively synthesized and remembered but also “made one’s own.” 36 Appropriation refers to the necessity that a place be found for the object of understanding within the epistemological framework and “historically effected consciousness” ( Gadamer 1975 , xxx) of the interpreter. However, such appropriation is not a mere squeezing of that which is encountered into existing interpretive boxes; “it is to receive an enlarged self from the apprehension of proposed worlds which are the genuine object of interpretation” ( Ricoeur 1981 , 182–83, and see also 192). In other words, appropriation is part of a dialectic that “includes the otherness within the ownness,” generating insights in an encounter with difference and converting them into forms of life, new capacities for understanding oneself and one’s world ( Ricoeur 1981 , 43–45; cf. Gottschall 2012 , 139–55).

Appropriation, then, helps capture the dynamic discussed so brilliantly by Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life : how “consuming” media is at the same time continuing to co-produce them, not only producing new meanings attributed to them but producing the social facticity of the media themselves: their reach, their impact, their very existence as mediating phenomena. 37 The consumption of hagiographical media is itself a production of significant and open-ended social facticity—the appropriation of hagiography is a form of hagiographical production, in the self and in the world. 38 Holiness, as “a made thing” ( Orsi 2011 , 98), is made by those who enact its significance in their lives.

From the perspective of whether there is an edifying “benefit” to the consumers of hagiography, however, appropriation is an equivocal issue. This making-one’s-own, necessary for real understanding and creative reproduction of what one consumes, means that what is mediated must be reconstituted within the frameworks (ideological, cultural, biological) into which it is mediated. From the theological perspective of traditions that make a priority of holiness, hagiographical mediation should be beneficial, and appropriating such media should be a pathway to holiness for those who do so (remaking the object of mediation in one’s own self). And yet, because edification presupposes appropriation, the digestion of (representations of) holiness into the building projects of human life has no set outcome, either theological or sociological. It may become a crystallization of authorized attitudes through the power of charismatic figures, a rigidification or reification of identities and forms of life, or a self-interested consumption of hagiographical media that corrupts rather than enhances the common life of the community. The building up of a fortress in place of a temple.

In fact, recent ethnographic studies of hagiographical mediation ( Heo 2018 ; Hollander 2018 ) have illuminated precisely this dynamic of how hagiography can fortify political imaginaries under some (perhaps most) circumstances but disrupt them under others. 39 The benefits experienced in the course of hagiographical appropriation (such as the heartwarming recognition that a saintly figure promotes or protects some cherished dimension of communal life) typically provide positive feedback to the epistemology and the interpersonal/intercultural conditions within which that experience takes place, but these benefits can also shock the system, as it were, if they are perceived as an alien or countercultural force to some unstable or intolerable situation. 40 As Andreas Glaeser describes this dynamic, understandings are stabilized over time as they are validated through “perceived agreement with authorities,” “success associated with enacting understandings in the world,” and an “experienced compatibility between the [variously derived] understandings we hold” ( Glaeser 2011b , 5; cf. 2011a , 41–44, 165–208). At the same time, a perception of contradiction between different sources of validation or authorization (such as between the experienced intervention of a saintly benefactor and the authorized interpretation provided or withheld by a religious institution) can lead to disorientations or even catastrophic upheavals in understanding (see Glaeser 2011a , 528–30).

Hagiography, then, can open windows as well as dig trenches in political imaginaries, and each of these processes falls under the category of appropriation insofar as each reflects the precipitation and purchase of understanding in the world. In other words, it should not be surprising that divergent assessment of the same appropriation of holiness (such that, for instance, the identification of a saint as an emblem of national liberation or as an agent of interreligious antagonism may be hailed as edifying by some and treated as morally ruinous by others within the same community) is inescapably a part of hagiographical process.

The foregoing retheorization of hagiography has inverted a familiar vector of scholarly sense-making between texts and contexts. Rather than promoting the investigation of ambient political, economic, intercultural, and other such dynamics as means to the end of better interpreting the media that exist within them (media that are typically predetermined as either belonging or not belonging to the category of hagiography), I have brought the processes of mediation themselves into the foreground, arguing that these may be less tangible than the media that are their products but are more fruitfully definitive of what hagiography is and does in the world. So doing, I aim to have provided first and foremost a cogent case for broadening the analytic purchase of the designations hagiography and hagiographical insofar as this equips scholars who are already working on (Christian) inscriptions of holiness and the societies in which they emerge and intervene with a better stocked, less restrictive interpretive toolbox.

But such an approach also provides an apparatus for illuminating the significant and underappreciated dynamics of hagiographical mediation that take place more broadly than in media explicitly representative of (some individual’s, community’s, or institution’s) understandings and experiences of holiness. My introductory interpretation of Angels in America along these lines is offered as one such example of hagiographical dynamics in a work of theater more reasonably seen as “secular” than “religious” (however saturated the work is with religious imagery and however inadequate these designations may be). 41 It would not be a stretch to plumb such cultural arenas as professional sports, children’s literature, reality television, or indeed partisan politics for their degrees of involvement with hagiographical imagination, representation, and appropriation. The possibilities are not infinite, but they are by no means limited by conventional disciplinary expectations of what constitutes representations of saints or even religious content (cf. Keune 2019 , 7; Hollander 2020 , 5–6).

However, the relationship between such implicit hagiographical dynamics and the more overt holy-making discourses, practices, and objects in Christianity (which have provided the bulk of my evidence and calibrated the theoretical shape of this article) is not at all clear-cut. Many implicitly hagiographical processes take place within contexts where Christian paradigms of holiness have had clear culture-making and culture-shaping force. In my own example, Angels in America was written by a Jewish author and is concerned with the interpenetration of several different religious communities in New York City and beyond, yet it appropriates and responds to Christian imaginaries not only in its contents but also in its history of effects, critiquing and intervening in American social norms saturated with such imaginaries. Such interreligious and parareligious appropriation and reactivity are historically the norm rather than the exception. Moreover, the history of colonization and globalization has positioned Christian imaginaries in a place of disproportionate intercultural power, power that has resulted in well-known patterns of mimicry and resistance (as is articulated with particular strength in the work of Franz Fanon, Edward Said, and Homi Bhabha). In Gil Anidjar’s provocative formulation, the apparent boundaries of Christianity as established by institutional and scholarly delineation in fact are no such thing; they disguise a much more pervasive “political hematology” ( Anidjar 2016 , 31) in which Christian concepts and norms covertly but influentially “circulat[e] between theology and the operations of the modern world” ( 2016 , viii; cf. Singh 2018 , 132–92).

In this light, it is all the more crucial that a Christianity-grounded theory not pronounce universalizing claims. Although I do not doubt the likelihood of interreligious resonance, it would be mistaken to assume that this hermeneutic is ready-made for application in other overtly religious and cultural settings. To do so would validate Christian normativity as a scholarly supposition (as was long the case in religious studies) rather than a historically effected and politically consequential dynamic that is itself in need of scrutiny. Therefore, the degree to which the present theory can be a contribution not only to my own field but also to the (still-emerging) project of comparative hagiology remains an open question. On the one hand, “religions” are not hermetically sealed off from one another, and nothing in this theory is necessarily limited by Christianity for its utility—because the cultural, political, epistemological, and theological dynamics of any religious tradition are enmeshed with those of others, changing together with and in response to them. 42 On the other hand (as has already been a matter of live debate in comparative hagiology settings), the use of Christianity-grounded analytic tools to interpret extra-Christian thought-worlds—without enormous care in translation and continual openness to theoretical amendment—is justifiably treated as objectionable by many scholars of those worlds. 43

One possible solution for interreligious adaptation of theory such as this would be to set aside such “emically loaded first-order terms” ( Taves 2011 , 58) as saints , hagiography , and holiness , replacing them with terms (such as perfected beings or specialness ) that do not slip so readily into the semantic grooves established by the history of Christianity. Although well-intentioned, this approach can err by becoming too generic to gain a firm analytic grip on the forms of understanding that animate the actual religious lives being interpreted, 44 or else by choosing putatively neutral terms that succeed only in disguising (rather than actually reconstructing for universal use) the older categories’ history of significance. Indeed, the whole academic enterprise is embedded in Euro-Christian semantic networks, not just the isolated terms where this entanglement is most easily recognizable. Throwing out hagiography and not religion on these grounds strikes me as tokenistic at best. Yet, if religion can be used with humility, judiciousness, and non-reductive comparison as a metaphorical grouping for understanding resonant human realities across a range of contexts, then so too surely can hagiography . A more satisfactory approach, then, is to invest substantially in a culture of scholarly collaboration (cf. Hollander 2020 ): cultivating partnerships with experts in other fields of inquiry, testing the ways in which each scholar’s theoretical frames open new questions and possibilities in others’ fields, and working together to refine a creative theoretical apparatus for mutual use. I hope and intend that the present work provides a fruitful resource for such a collaboration.

But even as we acknowledge the many academic dissonances around saints, hagiography, and holiness, and as we confront the real consequences of Christian hegemony in history and scholarship, we must still find a way to maintain an interpretive grip on these realities. There must, at the very least, be grounds for scholars (whether or not they are religiously invested) to speak with moral clarity on the ways that hagiographical mediation is, to this day, used and abused in the public sphere—an ethical distinction that too germophobic a commitment to scholarly neutrality is at risk of washing away. The study of hagiographical processes, unbound by medium or overtly religious authorization, is not only a resource for delineating and assessing the auras of holiness with which people and institutions enrobe all manner of agendas. It may also be a way of attuning public attention to the liberative possibilities that can be imagined in the interstices of those agendas: where holy figures trouble the water, where an unexpected wholeness can be glimpsed through the cracked state of things as they are, and where the dead struggle alongside the living, insisting on more life.

I am grateful for the ongoing conversation with mentors and colleagues that has improved this work substantially since its earliest formulation. In particular, I owe much to the generosity of Andreas Glaeser, Derek Krueger, and Massimo Rondolino.

On the analytic problems introduced by the instability (and semantic dependency on Abrahamic imaginaries) of “the hagio ,” see Keune (2019) ; cf. Taves (2011) . Yet, as Orsi argues (( 2011 ), 86), there is an “empirical warrant for continued interest in the term” holy insofar as people around the world continue to seize on it as the most adequate articulation of something in their experience. It is, in this respect, a “double intellectual tragedy” ( Orsi 2016 , 64) when the studied reality is “explained away” and constrained by the scholar’s interpretive horizon, which in turn cannot be enlarged or reoriented by what it has domesticated for the sake of its own maintenance. See also Hollander (2018 , 3–21), on holiness as a loadbearing discursive norm and experiential touchstone in Orthodox Christianity specifically.

See Schnelbach (2018) : “It’s this that gives the play its power, beyond all the wit and the visions of a Jean Cocteau afterworld. Belize’s heart, that can find room in it even for Roy Cohn, is the thing that will make this play as immortal as humanity ends up being.” Cf. Butler and Kois (2018 , 293–303).

As was the infamous case when the Charlotte Repertory Theater produced Angels in 1996 and so outraged a coalition of “Concerned Charlottians” and religious leaders that, after picketing the entire run of the play, they lobbied and succeeded in having the entire Charlotte Arts Council defunded. See Butler and Kois (2018 , 283–92).

On the semantic spread of the term as it was adopted by modern scholarship from uses in Greek and Latin theology (primarily to designate the “sacred writings” such as Psalms and Proverbs), see Philippart (1994) . For rich (but dated) bibliographic surveys of scholarship on hagiography, see Lotter (1979) ; Wilson (1983) .

See Monge (2016 , 10), on this conception of “an inherently false idealization.”

See Delehaye (1922 , 56–57); Van Ommeslaeghe (1981 , 155–63); cf. Krueger (2004 , 5–6), on distinguishing between hagiography as a modern category and ancient genres that we would designate as hagiographical, such as Lives of saints. In his manual of “scientific hagiography,” The Legends of the Saints (first published in 1905 and quickly upheld as the classic of the field), Delehaye takes as his task “to sketch the method for discriminating between materials that the historian can use and those that he should leave to poets and artists as their property, and to put readers on their guard against being led away by formulas and preconceived ideas” ( Delehaye 1988 , xxvii; cf. de Gaiffier 1970 , 139). This approach has, unsurprisingly, come under substantial scrutiny in more recent decades, for instance in Ševčenko (1995 , 3–7, 11); Louth (2004 , 361); and Efthymiadis (2006 , 160).

It is one of Lifshitz’s prevailing arguments that many if not most of those writers we would now call hagiographers did consider themselves to be writing “history” (classic examples include Theodoret’s History of the Monks of Syria or Palladius’ Lausiac History )—see Lifshitz (1994 , 100); cf. Wyschogrod (1990 , 28). However, see also Krueger (2010) on the ways that early Christian hagiographies rhetorically established different expectations for readers and enacted different “authorial subjectivities” (2010, 14) than did contemporary histories (even as this differentiation “was neither entirely consistent nor simultaneous” [2010, 13]).

The prevailing winds in the study of hagiography have been blowing in this direction for some time. Fifty years ago, Baudouin de Gaiffier offered a Bollandist perspective on the analytic gains of considering “calendriers, martyrologes, inscriptions, livres liturgiques (sacramentaires et bréviaires), litanies, hymnes, iconographie” as relevantly hagiographical alongside Vitae and Miracula ( de Gaiffier (1970 , 140)). Philippart (1994) offers some helpful reflections on the (relatively recent) restriction of hagiography to genre. Claudia Rapp frames hagiography primarily in terms of its content rather than its form ( Rapp 1999 , 64; cf. Rapp 2010 , entire but especially 120–23). So too, Patricia Cox Miller presents hagiography not as a specific literary genre, nor even as literature per se, but as “a set of discursive strategies for presenting sainthood” ( Miller 2009 , 118; see also 104 for arguments against the genre approach)—but as I will address presently, even this delimitation of hagiography as “discursive” (if discursive alone) is unwarranted. See also Skedros (2012 , 445); Rondolino (2017 , 35–40); Hollander (2020 , 3–4).

The adoption of hagiology for comparative hagiology’s overarching framework pertains in no small part to what is seen as the well-worn semantic rut and Christian embeddedness of hagiography , which is justly problematic for the project’s many participants working in non-Christian fields of study. Nonetheless, hagiology does not escape this problem, being itself a Greek Christian term for discourse and literature about saints and thus maintaining its uneasy orientation to “the hagio ” (that is, holiness); whatever analogues or family resemblances may be articulated by a given analysis cannot reasonably be sanitized of Christian associations (see Keune 2019 , 3–4). See also Hollander (2020 , 2–3), containing my own working distinction between hagiography and hagiology , both of which I see fit to use: “I describe the materials on which I work as ‘hagiographical media,’ that is, media that inscribe and transmit human understandings and experiences of holiness (and that include but are not limited to verbal inscriptions such as texts and prayers), and the discursive work of interpreting them as ‘hagiology,’ that is, the study of how holiness (or its analogues) is construed and of the media in which it is purported to be manifest.”

Can we not describe mental or spoken mapping as a form of (informal, immaterial) cartography? Do hikers not behave cartographically when they recall a previously perceived trail map in their minds and adjust their path accordingly? That these uses stretch the ordinary capacities of the term (which professional cartographers might be reasonably inclined to maintain!) is quite the point of this thought experiment.

Consider, in this respect, the difference between a map of Canada and a map of Gondor. Gondor is not the only imaginary territory in the analogy: Canada is just as fictional as it is physical, in that its integrity, borders, subdivisions, distinctiveness, and so forth are the product of understanding, institutions, and behavior. Territory is subjectively rendered, underpinned ideologically, and persuasively configured by media, coming to be itself by way of human mapmaking enterprises (as is entailed in the habitual use of map-territory analogies in critical theory and religious studies in particular).

It should go without saying that there are rich theological traditions that weigh in on these questions and theorize substantially around the nature and effects of holiness, the mediation of holiness, and the ways that such mediation not only inscribes and celebrates holiness but also imparts holiness to those who engage it properly.

Rondolino’s framework was developed independently from and roughly concurrently with the first iteration of my own ( Hollander 2018 ), and this independent formulation (and our subsequent collaboration) has persuaded us both that a process-based approach to hagiography is all the more promising.

Delehaye began his methodology for interpreting (what he took to be) hagiography with the puzzle that, on the one hand, “[t]he term should not be applied indiscriminately to any and every writing that bears on the saints” ( 1988 , 3), while on the other hand, it is introducing needless distinctions to exclude any given form of writing (from a lengthy and carefully crafted martyriological narrative, to a synopsis intoned annually in a liturgical setting, to the inscription of praise on the tomb of a saint, and so forth) purely because of its form (see also Delehaye 1922 , 56–86). His solution is that, rather than defining and delimiting hagiography by its form, scholars may look to function as the distinguishing feature: “So we see that to be strictly hagiographical the document must be of a religious character and aim at edification [ édification ]. The term then must be confined to writings inspired [ inspiré ] by religious devotion to the saints and intended [ destiné ] to increase that devotion” ( Delehaye 1988 , 3, with reference to the French original). Delehaye’s easily neglected insight, in other words, is that hagiographical texts are not trying and failing to provide objective historical accounts (cf. 1988 , xxxii), but rather they are hagiographical precisely insofar as their primary priority is the (quite historical) effect that they bring about. This effect is what Delehaye describes as the power “not only to interest people, but above all to edify them, to ‘do them good’” (1988, 54), and what Edith Wyschogrod, much more recently, calls an “imperative” or “perlocutionary” force ( Wyschogrod 1990 , 6, 28; cf. Austin 1975 , 101–20, on “perlocution,” the consequential momentum of a speech act; see also Ritchey 2017 on “efficacious texts”).

I see no reason to disqualify as hagiographical an accident of nature (for instance, a stone that appears to contain the imprint of a horse’s hoof—not uncommon in the cult of St. George) that is seized upon by the imagination of a community as signifying the presence or patronage of a saintly figure and treated as part of the “dossier” (a preferred term of Delehaye’s) of the saint, installed within a shrine, visited for votive purposes, and so forth.

I am not suggesting that genre is irrelevant to scholarly considerations of hagiography, nor that hagiographical producers themselves have not conformed deliberately to generic expectations. Fruitful practice-oriented considerations of genre as a category in the study of hagiography, its producers, and its audiences can be found in Krueger (1999) , ( 2010 ); and especially ( 2004 ) (e.g., 1–14 on hagiographical genre[s] as grounded in and determined by practices of authorship and recognition). My point is that genre should not be viewed as determinative or even limiting of the sorts of functions that hagiographical media enact.

On “inscription” as the flexible fixation of meaning in media that can be transmitted to others and shared by (and helping to constitute) publics, see Ricoeur (1976 , 25–37), ( 1981 ), 203–6; Geertz 1980 , 31; Warner 2002 , 65–124.

In this respect, I am equipped with what Andreas Glaeser describes as an “ethnographic imagination” that “allows us to retranslate institutions into the processes that form them” ( Glaeser 2011a , 55). A processualist view of the social world has proven especially promising in the study of (especially) lived religion in recent years. See Glaeser (2014 , 213), on how a “process ontology … sees the world as primarily made up of flows or happenings rather than of thing-like entities as most of the traditional European Plato and Aristotle inspired metaphysics does.” Cf. Abbott (2016 , 292).

Consider, as an obvious example, the role of religious images in teaching, motivating, edifying, and being appropriated for individuals’ own imaginative reworking of what holiness is and how it figures in their lives.

Cf. Heo (2018 , 195–96), which draws on Gell (1998) as well and provides an instructive reading of a particular work of hagiographical representation in light of these encompassing, interwoven, multisensory processes of mediation: a print poster of the Virgin Mary, encased in glass to invite encounter while precluding direct touch, dripping oil onto a plastic canopy that extends out into the church space, with a television feed broadcasting the collection and distribution of this oil (and individual visitors’ videos captured on mobile phones and shared across social networks on the internet).

Hagiographical narratives are indeed the most directly theoretical of the media in which understandings and experiences of holiness are inscribed, that is, they provide the most explicit discursive frameworks for devotees to make conscious sense of holiness and appropriate it deliberately into their lives. As far as Christianity at least is concerned, without such discourse (whether written, in the case of a popular Life or martyrdom account, or oral, in the case of a homily or liturgical formula), the other means of mediation drift apart from one another: the icon no longer conjures the events of a martyr’s confrontation with the powers of the world, the relic no longer can be identified as belonging to a particular saint, and the biblical resonances through which the holiness of the saints is interpretively filtered are lost.

In my own field of Orthodox Christianity, this is the case in large part because of the primacy of “the Word” in Christian worldmaking, such that even apparently non-textual media are nevertheless constituted in terms of a verbal construal of ultimate reality and within a linguistic metaphorical frame for understanding the most fundamental mediation of divine holiness to the human world: the word made flesh (see Harpham 1987 , 17; Cameron 1991 , 5–9).

See Ricoeur (1976 , 26–30), on the need for a middle path between the “intentional fallacy” and the “fallacy of the absolute text”: “If the intentional fallacy overlooks the semantic autonomy of the text, the opposite fallacy forgets that a text remains a discourse told by somebody, said by someone to someone else about something. It is impossible to cancel out this main characteristic of discourse without reducing texts to natural objects, i.e., to things which are not man-made, but which, like pebbles, are found in the sand” (30).

These three terms are not the only terms available for the processes in question. They are Latinate terms whose applicability beyond Latin-inflected cultures relies on translation of one kind or another, with all the moral entailments thereof (as is the case, for that matter, with hagiography and holiness beyond Greek-influenced cultures, as I address in my conclusion). But the terms themselves are not the point of the theory, except insofar as they are useful for providing a metaphorical grip on the complexities of the lived psychosocial world. Moreover—and this may be obvious, but it is worth noting explicitly—these processes, despite being actively entailed in hagiographical production and consumption, are by no means unique to hagiography or connected in any intrinsic way with “the holy.” They are human realities that are put to work wherever hagiography happens, with (materially and culturally) distinct dynamics related to the needs of a given hagiographical circumstance; it would be no less reasonable to examine the role of imagination, representation, and appropriation in (say) cartography as well. Regardless of arguments that may be made about the extraordinariness, excessiveness, radical otherness, and so forth (see Orsi 2011 , 102–104), of holiness and the experiences thereof, the ways that these experiences (and the understandings formed from or generating them) are mediated in human thought, life, practices, and institutions are thoroughly human and interrelated with the processes at work in mediation more generally.

This is meant to be inclusive of metonymic and synecdochic types—for instance, the representation of a saint by means of a cloak that the saint had worn or a representation of the whole person by means of their painted appearance alone. Representation need not only take place by way of overt resemblance (see J. Webb 2009 , 91–92); the representation of a nation by means of a flag deals with resemblance between medium and mediated rather differently than does Van Gogh’s Starry Night , and rather more differently still than does a poster of Starry Night that one might pick up in a museum gift shop.

We find such eminent Christian hagiographical theorists as John Chrysostom and John Damascene instructing their audiences to make their own selves and their interpersonal conduct ( politeia ) into new media that continue to represent the holiness that has transformed them (see Hollander 2018 , chapters 5 and 6). Thus, hagiographical consumers can themselves “represent” a saint, manifesting something of that person in a way perceptible to others, as we may speak of representing an ideal or an institution. These considerations lead us in a new direction, toward the crucial concept of mimēsis (which can be said to integrate each of these other glosses on representation—“substitution/delegation,” “simulation/depiction,” and “imitation/copying”). However, mimēsis is a topic with so widespread a scholarly industry that more in-depth discussion, for example of the sociology of mimetic relationships (see Glaeser 2011a , 235–39) or of the resonance between the hagiographical processes discussed here and Paul Ricoeur’s theorization of “threefold mimesis” ( Ricoeur 1984–1988 ), deserves an independent treatment in future work.

This notion bears a more than passing resonance with the conception of imagination in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason , where imagination “has to bring the manifold of intuitions into the form of an image” ( 1998 , §A120)—an image-concept that not only reflects prior perception but also shapes subsequent perception. Cf. Ricoeur (1984–1988 , III.185).

This standard notion of imagination, although still useful, has been criticized and nuanced further by such philosophers as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Gilbert Ryle on the grounds that imaginative “seeing-as” need not involve the active generation of mental images so much as a pre-reflective interpretation according to a repertoire of possible images (as in Wittgenstein’s famous thought experiment of the duck-rabbit, which can be seen as either animal according to perceptual habits that precede the active generation of mental images). See ( Sheppard 2014 ), 7–8.

This formulation belongs to the fifth-century (BCE) rhetorician Gorgias (1982) (from §17 of his Encomium on Helen ), upon whose foundation Aristotle builds his peerlessly influential treatment of imagination (as the conversion of aisthēmata , sense impressions, into phantasmata , mental images available for reuse). On these matters in Gorgias and Aristotle, see R. Webb (2009 , 111–13); Sheppard (2014 , 6–10).

As Glaeser puts it, “The imagination matters because it is the very medium in which we paint our futures while connecting them at the same time with the present and the past. One could also say that the imagination[,] presenting that which is absent or otherwise inaccessible[,] furnishes context and thus meaning to our life” ( 2011b , 5). Cf. Heo (2018 , 19–20), on how “the circulation of relics, apparitions, and icons activates multiple ‘social imaginaries,’ or the ways in which people imagine their belonging to a collective whole.”

Recall Delehaye (1988 , 54) on edification as the “good” that is done by hagiography for its consumers. However, this basic sense of benefit is insufficient for the use to which I put the term. Treating edification as a psychosocial process, rather than just an authorial intention, requires investigating how hagiographical audiences actually use hagiography in ways that they or others construe as beneficial, transformative, and the like. Thus, edification in my sense is inclusive of what Rondolino describes as “sectarian legitimation as well as doctrinal and political polemics” ( Rondolino 2017 , 7), even as scholars may decline to assume that such a process is indeed “beneficial.”

The double-meaning in the English (derived from the Latin aedificare , meaning “to build”) holds true for the Greek as well: oikodomeisthai is the verbal form of oikodomē , a “building” or “house.” Note also the interpretation of edification as a social process given in de Certeau 1988 , 272: the hagiographical “return to origins allows unity to be reestablished at a time when the group, through its development, runs the risk of being dispersed. Hence memory, whose construction is linked to the disappearance of beginnings, is combined with the productive ‘edification’ of an image intended to protect the group from dispersion.”

See, for example, 1 Corinthians 11:1 (“Become imitators [ mimētai ] of me, just as I am of Christ”); and Galatians 4:12 (“Become as I am, for I have become as you are”). Margaret Mitchell addresses in depth how Paul makes of himself “a one-man multi-media presentation of the gospel of Christ crucified” ( 2004 , 189), and analyzes the “ethical program rooted in his call for others to imitate him, even as he offers himself as a mimētēs , ‘graphic copy,’ of Christ’s suffering death” (2004, 191).

See 1 Thessalonians 1:6–7: “And you became imitators of us and of the Lord, taking hold [ dexamenoi ] of the word with the joy of the Holy Spirit, even in great affliction, with the result that you yourself became the model [ typon ] for all those believers in Macedonia and Achaia.”

This dynamic of mediating onward the holiness that has been mediated by others, by taking hold of it and making it one’s own, is at the very heart of hagiographical process in an Orthodox Christian idiom. Consider, at the roots of this tradition, Athanasius of Alexandria’s (1994) introduction to the Life of Antony (SC 400.124–28), in which he enjoins his audience to “believe” ( mē apisteite ) what they hear and read about Antony (appropriating what is mediated to them), to “remember” it ( mnēmoneuein )—storing it up in their imagination where it will be available for use) and thereby to “emulate” ( zēlōsai , literally, to be zealous for) the example of what they remember (deploying anew what they have appropriated, making it available in turn to others).

See Ricoeur (1981 , 178): “An interpretation is not authentic unless it culminates in some form of appropriation ( Aneignung ), if by that terms we understand the process by which one makes one’s own ( eigen ) what was initially other or alien ( fremd ).”

See de Certeau on reading as “a silent production” that “pluralizes” a work that had begun its life as a single, “proper” production ( 1984 , xxi), on the artistry of manipulating institutional systems meant to produce particular effects so that they are consumed otherwise than intended (1984, 29), on how the practice of space makes it real—and continually renewed ( 1984 , 117), and on the reader as a “novelist” in the sense of a navigator or a colonist ( 1984 , 173). Cf. Berger (1967 , 16–20), on appropriation as the conversion of “objective facticity” into “subjective facticity.” Gell’s notion of “distributed objects” is pertinent here insofar as “artworks at once anticipate future works and hark back to others” (Thomas, Foreword to Gell 1998 , xii; cf. Gell’s own comments on 222). Consider, for an example, how the Mona Lisa is not just a painting—it is a painting made what it is because of how it is treated by its consumers; the phenomenon of the work includes also the proliferation of the painting’s reproductions in postcards, clothing, and vast array of variations, manipulations, and parodies by other artists (examples are no farther than a Google Images search for “Mona Lisa”—the co-productive appropriations begin almost immediately and vastly outstrip images of the “original,” which itself is only “the” Mona Lisa because of this vast field of appropriation).

Again, such co-productive consumption can make something other than hagiography into hagiography. A poster of a saint created to make a buck can become hagiographical insofar as it is used as an icon; a rock with a hoof-like mark, created by chance, can become hagiographical insofar as it is appropriated for the celebration of a saint’s patronage and presence.

Examples of both abound in these two works, including: apparitions of the Virgin of Zaytun undergoing a process of public reassessment between 1968 and 2009 and being transformed during this time “into a sectarian image of Christian-Muslim enmity” ( Heo 2018 , 29; cf. 107–41); the collective commemoration of the Two Saints’ Martyrs in Alexandria, Egypt, which “catalyzed emblematic performances of Christian-Muslim unity calling for Mubarak’s resignation” ( Heo 2018 , 27; cf. 33–67); St. George serving as a communal guardian of Greek-Cypriots, his chapels imagined as military beacons “guarding against the barbarians” and his name inscribed as graffiti on disused mosques, resonating with the appearance of the saint’s image appearing on flags during the Greek War of Independence ( Hollander 2018 , 184–89, 232–33); and a monastery of the Apostle Andrew serving not only as a multi-mediated symbol of Greek-Cypriots’ displacement from the north of the island but also as a shrine where material and discursive petitions for peace and an island healed of sectarian and political division are offered to this day, by Christians and Muslims alike ( Hollander 2018 , 562–64; cf. Harmanşah 2016 ).

Cf. Orsi (2011 ), 90, interpreting the attribution of “holiness” to the author’s severely disabled uncle as “a powerful, if unpredictable, agent of—and at the same time, a powerful, if unpredictable, wedge of destabilization and otherness to—the authority of the world in which the holy cripple arose and was experienced.” Cf. Orsi (2016 , 42–43), on “the theoretical question of whether, once created by power, the gods do not turn around and trouble or thwart the agendas of power, as Catholic Church officials are surely able to attest.”

For another example along similar lines, see Lawrence Jasud’s (2011) marvelous essay on the hagiographical multimediation (though he never uses the term) around “St. Elvis” at Graceland.

Christian paradigms of holiness, to say the least, neither originate with the formation of explicit Christian communities (being rooted in far older priestly and prophetic logics, and being entangled with imperial Roman understandings of purity and mediation) nor remain unchanged and undiversified through the long globalization and in(ter)culturation of Christianity.

See Rondolino (2017 , 1–6), working through the “latent skepticism and post-modern reticence to employ fundamentally western and Christian categories as metalinguistic mediums for the taxonomy and systematic analysis of any datum from non-western and non-Christian cultural contexts” (2017, 3); and see again Keune (2019 , 3–4), on the outsized familiarity and amenability of “ hagio ”-related theorization among scholars of Christianity.

See again Orsi (2016 , 63–64), on the “double intellectual tragedy” of explaining away holiness through social-scientific solutions that are internally consistent for the western academy but that preclude the interpretive partnership of the people studied, so failing to open new possibilities in existing frameworks.

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Thomas Head’s “Hagiography: A Brief Introduction”

This page reprints the contents of a page created by Thomas Head (1956-2014) for The ORB: the On-line Reference Book for Medieval Studies, which is currently unavailable. It was recreated from a file archived on The Internet Archive (FILE ARCHIVED ON 3:44:32 Jul 30, 2013). Links have not yet all been updated.

Hagiography

Thomas Head

The term hagiography is derived from Greek roots ( hagios =holy; graphe =writing) and has come to refer to the full range of Christian literature which concerns the saints. The scope of that literature has been breathtakingly wide over the course of two millennia of Christian history, including such genres as lives of the 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, visions, and the like. These works have been composed not only in the official clerical languages of the Christian churches, such as Latin and Greek, but in the full range of vernacular languages as well. Works of hagiography, in this sense of the term, have been written by Christians from at least the middle of the second century of the Common Era to the present day. The middle ages, however, was a particularly fruitful time for the composition of hagiography, and hagiographic texts remain particularly important to our understanding of the history of medieval Christianity and society. The focus of this essay, and of the other essays which I have prepared for ORB in connection with it, is on the middle ages, and in particular on western Christendom. (Two good places to search for material related to hagiography in eastern Christendom are the Internet Medieval Sourcebook: Saints’ Lives , edited by Paul Halsall and the Survey of Translations of Byzantine Saints’ Lives compiled by Alice-Mary Talbot. The term “hagiography” and other terms related to sanctity, such as “saint,” have specifically Chrsitian roots, but have been adopted by modern scholars and practitioners to apply to parallel practices inother religious traditions. See my ORB essay Christian Sanctity in Comparative Perspective .)

Before proceeding further with a consideration of hagiographic texts composed in the middle ages, it is important to note that the term “hagiography” can also be used to refer to the modern discipline of studying such writings. In these current usages, the term hagiography is a term of relatively modern vintage. Medieval writers usually used cognate terms to refer instead to the “holy writings” of the Bible. The Greek word hagiographa , by contrast, was used in late antiquity to specify one of the three divisions of the Hebrew scriptures. Similar usage continued in medieval Latin: Notker the Stammerer (+ ca.890), for example, used the word hagiographi to refer to the “holy writings” of the Bible. The systematic study and criticism of writings about the saints began in the seventeenth century with the work of clerics of the Congregation de Saint-Maur and the Société des Bollandistes (who are still very active scholars and who maintain a site on the World Wide Web, click here ). It was only then that the term “hagiography” came to refer to this new discipline and its subject matter, in what might be called its modern sense.

Hagiography can only be understood with reference to the concept of sanctity and to the practice of the cult of saints. For medieval Christians saints were those “holy people” ( sancti or sanctae in Latin) who had posthumously entered the kingdom of heaven. According to certain theological definitions of sanctity, anyone who entered heaven was a saint. In practice, however, Christian communities honored only a limited number of people with the title of saint. Crucial to such official recognition of sainthood was the celebration of a feast which marked the day of the saint’s death, that is the day considered to be that person’s birth into the kingdom of heaven. Thus in practice a person becomes a saint only when he or she is accepted as such by an audience and provided the blessing of an institutional authority. In late antiquity and the early middle ages, bishops controlled the celebration of such feasts. By the thirteenth century the papacy came to assert its authority over this process (or canonization as it came to be known) for the western (or Roman Catholic) Church as a whole. More limited cults, however, continued to be fostered at the local level, while varied forms of episcopal and imperial authority continued to be decisive in eastern (or Orthodox) churches. Because of the varied ways through which the veneration of saints could be authorized, there was and is no single universally authoritative list of Christian saints. Rather there are many lists, litanies, and calendars of the holy people given public honor by Christian institutions and communities in varied times and places. Hagiography played a pivotal role in this process, for the very composition and use of a hagiographic text implied that its subject has received institutional recognition. The very composition of a hagiographic text does serve as evidence, however, that its subject once received some form of such public honor. The celebration of a feast or the existence of a relic shrine are other indications of officially sanctioned status as a saint. 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 as such the ideals and practice of sanctity changed, often greatly, over the course of time and place in Christianity.

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.

Saints were venerated long after their deaths and thus long after memory of them had faded. The most common type of hagiography, that is lives of saints ( vitae ), served to record the actions which had formed and demonstrated their holiness. Excerpts from such lives were often read out as part of the liturgical celebration of a saint’s feast. In the mid-ninth century Bertholdus of Micy, in his Life of St. Maximinus of Micy , described the purpose of hagiography, “The churches of the faithful scattered through the world celebrate together with highest praise the fame of holy men. Their tombs, which are wreathed in the metals of gold and silver, as well as in layers of precious stones and a shell of marble, now bear witness to their pious memory. . . Surely to no less a degree than miracles, which incite the love proferred by the devotion of faithful people, the monuments of letters which are set down on pages also fully satisfy the senses of those who read and hear them. For what has been said and done by the saints ought not be concealed in silence. God’s love provided their deeds to serve as a norm of living for the men of their own times as well as of those years which have since passed; they are now to be imitated piously now by those who are faithful to Christ.”

The aim of hagiographers was not to produce biography in the modern sense, but rather sought rather to portray a saint as an exemplar of the Christian life. Gregory of Tours (+595) wrote that he decided to name a work the Life of the Fathers rather than the Lives of the Fathers because he deemed most important the “merits and virtues” common to a single ideal of sanctity, rather than the diverse singularities of the individual lives of his many subjects. Elsewhere Gregory remarked, “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.” The lives of the saints thus provided a model, albeit an extraordinary and almost unattainable one, of the Christian life. The records of the lives of the saints were a template of Christian virtue, a map of the path to salvation. Just as epics such as Beowulf or the Norse sagas provide a key to understanding the ideals of Germanic culture, so too the works which follow will help to unlock the ideals of early medieval Christianity. 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.” 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. Pedagogic and pastoral, as well as spiritual, concerns lay very much at the heart of the enterprise of composing hagiography. The student of hagiography should remember that these works 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 thus provides some of the most valuable records for the reconstruction and study of the practice, as well as the spiritual ideals, of medieval Christianity.

To be sure, many works of hagiography-such Baudinovia’s Life of St. Radegund or Raymond of Capua’s Life of St. Catherine of Siena -were written by authors who had first-hand knowledge of their subject. But even these authors modeled their portraits on existing ideals of sanctity and drew upon a large body of traditional and somewhat standardized stories about the saints which are known to modern scholars as topoi or types. Such stories were borrowed, sometimes with little change, from earlier saints’ lives and were intended to convey a moral message rather than historically accurate information. Works written centuries after the fact were often little more than bundles of such topoi. Some-such as the anonymous Life of St. Montana -were composed by authors who knew nothing about their subject’s life or identity. These consisted virtually entirely of stories borrowed from the lives of other saints in which the names and other details have simply been changed. This traditional or typical character is one of the most striking aspects of hagiography. Hagiographic works must sometimes be used with extreme caution, recognizing that they reveal more about the religious and cultural world of their authors than about the lived lives of their subjects.

When reading works of hagiography, it is important to keep in mind that the primary aim of the authors was not to compose a biographical record of the saint, but rather to portray the subject as an exemplar of Christian virtue. Hagiographers also sought to show how the saints themselves had imitated such norms, particularly those provided by the life of Christ and previous saints. Just as they encouraged their audience to imitate the example of the saints, so too they employed the literary models offered them by the Bible and by earlier hagiographic works. Stories, themes, and motifs were repeated from the life of one saint to that of another, each hagiographer adapting a traditional pool of material to the needs of the narrative at hand. Hagiographers even went so far as to repeat phrases and whole passages verbatim from earlier works. The effect, largely intentional, was in part to subsume the particularity of a given saint’s life into a generalized type of sanctity, such as the martyr, the virgin or the holy bishop. Such use of models aided the moral and didactic purpose of hagiography. As André Vauchez has noted, hagiography was a genre which “aims precisely at blurring the individual’s traits and transforming his or her lifetime into a fragment of eternity.” At the same time, the traditional character of hagiography can be overstated. The models of sanctity changed considerably over time, as each new author used and thus altered extant tradition.

In addition to exemplary conduct, the “merits and virtues” described by hagiographers also included the miracles which God performed through the saints. Such miracles did not only occur during the lives of the saints, but also posthumously at their tombs or otherwise in relation to their relics. Posthumous miracles included such visible marvels as cures and exorcisms, as well as invisible acts such as the remission of sins. The devout came to the shrines of saint or prayed to them in search of miraculous intercession. Hagiography recorded these aspects of the veneration of the saints through collections of posthumous miracle stories ( miracula ) and accounts of major events in the history of relic cults ( inventiones , that is the “discovery” or ritual placement of relics in a shrine which inaugurated their public veneration, and translationes , the transfer of relics from one shrine to another).

As noted above, sanctity is in many important respects a changing social construct, rather than an immutable theological ideal. Hagiography was formed by and in turn helpted to form the history of the changing ideals of sanctity. I have composed four ORB essays to complement this present introduction to hagiography. The first, The Cult of Saints and their Relics , discusses the relationship of hagiogrpahy and sanctity to its audience and reception through the veneration of the saints. The second, Women and Hagiography in Medieval Christianity , considers the ways in which gender in particular molded ideals of sanctity in the medieval west. The final two essays provide a survey of the historical development of hagiography and the cult of the saints over the course of the middle ages. The Development of Hagiography and the Cult of Saints in Western Christendom to the Year 1000 has a wide geographical scope, covering western Christendom for late antiquity and the early middle ages. The complementary survey of the later middle ages, The Development of Hagiography and the Cult of the Saints in the Later Middle Ages: The Example of the Kingdom of France from the Capetian accession to the Reformation , is limited to a single important region of western Christendom. I intend to expand the scope of that essay over the course of the 1999-2000 academic year. For the beginning student of hagiography and medieval history, I have made two introductory guides available: An Introductory Guide to Research in the Medieval Hagiography (focused on primary sources) and An Introductory Guide to Scholarship on Hagiography in the Early Middle Ages (focused on secondary works). For more advanced students and researchers, I have made available a set of ten detailed bibliographies on various aspects of medieval hagiography. These and other resources may be accessed by returning to the main page of the hagiography section of ORB.

Attwater, Donald. The Penguin Dictionary of Saints . Harmondsworth, 1965.

Aigrain, René. L’hagiographie: ses sources, ses méthodes, son histoire . Paris, 1953.

Barone, Giulia, and Marina Caffiero, Francesco Scorza Barcellona (eds.). Modelli di comportamento/modelli di santità. Contrasti, intersezioni, complementarietà . Sacro/santo, 10. Turin, 1994.

Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Renate, and Timea Szell (eds.). Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe . Ithaca, NY, 1991.

Boesch Gajano, Sofia, and and Luigi Sebastiani (eds.). Culto dei santi, istituzioni e classi sociali in età preindustriale . L’Aquila, 1984.

Brown, Peter. The Cult of the Saints. Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity . Chicago, 1981.

Brown, Peter. “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity,” in Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (Chicago, 1982), pp. 103-52;

“The Saint as Exemplar in Late Antiquity.” In John Hawley (ed.), Saints and Virtues (Berkeley, 1987), pp. 3-14;

“Arbiters of the Holy: The Christian Holy Man in Late Antiquity.” In 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 6.3 (1998) 353-376.

Bynum, Caroline. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women . Berkeley, 1987.

Delehaye, Hippolyte. Legends of the Saints , trans. V. M. Crawford (London, 1907; reprint, South Bend, 1961).

Dubois, Jacques and Jean-Loup Lemaitre. Sources et méthodes de l’hagiographie médiévale . Paris, 1993.

Elliott, Alison. Roads to Paradise. Reading the Lives of the Early Saints. Hanover, NH, 1987.

Farmer, David. The Oxford Dictionary of Saints . Revised edition. Oxford, 1992.

Farmer, Sharon. Communities of Saint Martin: Legend and Ritual in Medieval Tours . Ithaca, NY, 1991.

Geary, Patrick. Furta Sacra. Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages . Princeton, 1978; second edition 1990.

Graus, Frantisek. Volk, Herrscher und Heiliger im Reich der Merowinger. Studeien zur Hagiographie der Merowingerzeit . Prague, 1965.

Head, Thomas. “Hagiography.” In Medieval France: An Encyclopedia , eds. William Kibler and Grover Zinn (New York: Garland, 1995), pp. 433-7.

Head, Thomas. “Hagiography.” In Women in the Middle Ages: An Encyclopedia , ed. Nadia Margolis (New York: Garland, in press).

Head, Thomas. Hagiography and the Cult of Saints. The Diocese of Orléans, 800-1200 . Cambridge, 1990.

Head, Thomas (ed.). Medieval Hagiography: An Anthology . New York, 1999.

Heffernan, Thomas. Sacred Biography. Saints and Their Biographers in the Middle Ages. Oxford, 1988.

Kleinberg, Aviad. Prophets in Their Own Country: Living Saints and the Making of Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages . Chicago, 1992.

Kieckhefer, Richard. Unquiet Lives. Fourteenth-Century Saints and Their Religious Milieu . Chicago, 1984.

Lifshitz, Felice. “Beyond Positivism and Genre: ‘Hagiographical’ Texts as Historical Narrative.” Viator , 25 (1994), pp. 95-113.

McNamara, Jo Ann, and John Halborg, with E. Gordan Whatley (eds.). Sainted Women of the Dark Ages . Durham, 1992.

Noble, Thomas and Thomas Head (eds.). Soldiers of Christ: Saints and Saints’ Lives from Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages . University Park, PA, 1994.

Smith, Julia. “Oral and Written: Saints, Miracles, and Relics in Brittany, c. 850-1250” Speculum 65 (1990), pp. 309-43.

Tilliette, Jean-Yves et al.(eds.). Les fonctions des saints dans le monde occidental (IIIe-XIIIe siècle). Actes du colloque organisé par l’Ecole française de Rome avec le concours de l’Université de Rome “La Sapienza” Rome, 27-29 octobre 1988 . Collection de l’Ecole française de Rome, 149. Rome: Ecole française, 1991.

Vauchez, André. La sainteté en occident aux derniers siècles du moyen âge d’après les procès de canonisation et les documents hagiographiques . Rome, 1981. English translatioin as Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages . Trans. Jean Birrell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Zarri, Gabriella. La sante vive: cultura e religiosità femminile nella prima età moderna. Sacro/santo, 2. Turin, 1990.

Copyright ©1999, Thomas Head. This file may be copied on the condition that the entire contents,including the header and this copyright notice, remain intact.The contents of ORB are copyright ©1995-1999 Laura V. Blanchard and Carolyn Schriber except as otherwise indicated herein.

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ENGL 4892: Medieval Manuscripts & Where to Find Them (Camp): Hagiography (The Saints)

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Hagiography

Medieval hagiography comprises narratives that recount the saints' lives ( vitae ). Typically, these texts include the deeds and miracles associated with the saint, the conditions of their death ( passio  or passion) and martyrdom.

The hagiographical literature, which often describes a saint's life in graphic detail, is a vital source for medieval social, cultural and intellectual history. The resources below include a very small selection of basic tools for researching the lives of the saints. Both primary sources and secondary sources are available via the UGA Libraries.  

For even further reading on the subject, the following websites are especially comprehensive:

Internet Medieval Sourcebook: Saint's Lives   http://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/Halsall/sbook3.asp

Ménestrel ​ http://www.menestrel.fr/spip.php?rubrique427&lang=en  ​ Guide to Internet resources about Medieval hagiography, in a web site dedicated to the Middle Ages and run by a group of French and Belgian historians.  (The website has an English version, linked above.)

(Image Credit:  Saint Margaret with a Lady Donor.  Attributed to the Luçon Master, ca. 1405, Princeton University Art Museum, http://artmuseum.princeton.edu/)

Primary Sources

• Patrologia Latina Database Writings of the major Christian writers from Tertullian to the death of Pope Innocent III in 1216.

Researching Saints (Secondary Sources)

Religious Iconography

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hagiography

[ hag-ee- og -r uh -fee , hey-jee- ]

• the writing and critical study of the lives of the saints; hagiology .
• a biography that treats the person with excessive or undue admiration.

/ ˌhæɡɪˈɒɡrəfɪ; ˌhæɡɪəˈɡræfɪk /

• the writing of the lives of the saints
• biography of the saints
• any biography that idealizes or idolizes its subject

Discover More

Derived forms.

• hagiographic , adjective

Other Words From

• hag·i·o·graph·ic [ hag-ee-, uh, -, graf, -ik, hey-jee- ] , hagi·o·graphi·cal adjective

Word History and Origins

Origin of hagiography 1

Example Sentences

This movie is not a hagiography, and it stops short of treating Larson like a genius.

Birdsall gives us a portrait of Beard that is neither a take-down nor hagiography.

She wants a “hagiography,” and the conflicts and confusions that ensue provide The Last Word with its comic momentum.

We Could Be King is, of course, part of a larger emergent genre, that of the high school football hagiography.

Surfing on an ocean of media hagiography, Christie seemed unbeatable just when it was time for Democrats to declare themselves.

And thank God, given the current glut of baseball hagiography on the market.

One has to be careful not to descend into a mess of hagiography.

But the great and absorbing subject of poetry in this age is Hagiography.

Hagiography was now a lost branch of art, as completely lost as wood carving, and the miniatures of the old missals.

The second version, though LB calls it miraculum insolitum, is one of the commonplaces of hagiography.

Space would now fail us to trace the development of hagiography in the Church.

The hagiography of the Eastern and the Greek church also has been the subject of important publications.

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Definition of hagiography noun from the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary

hagiography

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What is a Hagiography?

A hagiography is a biography of a saint. The term is also used to describe the study of saints, although some people prefer to describe the study of saints as hagiology. Hagiographies have an ancient and esteemed history in Christian culture, and they are also present in several other religious traditions, especially Buddhism and Islam .

The art of hagiography arose early in the days of the Christian church, when it was used primarily as a propaganda tool. The idea was that by disseminating information about the lives of the saints, Christians could conceivably win converts. Hagiographies were far from dull accounts of history; they included inspirational stories and set up legends and myths about the people in them. Many hagiographies also included ghoulish descriptions of martyrdom, undoubtedly to appeal to people with more base sentiments.

In addition to being used to spread Christianity, hagiographies were also utilized as a tool to sanctify people. Many notable ecclesiastical figures and other church authorities commissioned hagiographies of themselves in the hopes that they would later be venerated as saints, and this was sometimes successful. In all cases, a hagiography typically stressed the subject's bravery, intrepid spirit, and Christian faith.

The heyday of the hagiography occurred in the medieval era, when numerous hagiographies were produced, both individually and in collections. During this era, many people created calendars of the saints, and those who could read were able to learn about a different saint each day; a medieval version of the page a day calendar, as it were. Many of these calendars have since been canonized, and a calendar of saints days exists today in both the Catholic and Orthodox churches.

Although the hagiography is treated as a bit old fashioned in the modern era, it is still possible to find well-researched scholarly works on the lives of the saints, along with more traditional hagiographies. Some of these materials are quite interesting, documenting the lives and works of early moves and shakers in the Christian church, as well as the activities of more modern saints.

Because a hagiography was typically designed to present its subject in the best possible light, you sometimes hear “hagiography” used as a slang term to describe a secular biography. When used in this sense, a hagiography is a fawning, uncritical, and often poorly researched biography which paints a very adulating picture of its subject, rather than an accurate discussion of someone's life and works.

Ever since she began contributing to the site several years ago, Mary has embraced the exciting challenge of being a LanguageHumanities researcher and writer. Mary has a liberal arts degree from Goddard College and spends her free time reading, cooking, and exploring the great outdoors.

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Discussion Comments

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• By: Eray Like many other religions, Islam has a long history of hagiography.
• By: kostin77 Hagiographies are found in Buddhism.

Hagiography

Hagiography is the writing of saints ' lives. It comes from the Greek words άγιος; and γραφή = "holy writing" or "writing about the holy (ones)."

• Hagiography refers literally to writings on the subject of such holy persons; specifically, the biographies of persons publicly glorified (canonized) by the Church.
• Hagiology , by contrast, is the study of saints collectively, without focusing on the life of an individual saint.
• 1 Hagiography as a form of biography
• 2 Development of hagiography
• 3 Usefulness
• 5 External links

Hagiography as a form of biography

Hagiography is unlike other forms of biography in that it does not necessarily attempt to give a full, historical account of the life of an individual saint. Rather, the purpose of hagiography is soteriological —that is, the life of the saint is written so that it might have a salvific effect on those who encounter it.

As such, hagiography often fails to include details which are standard for most biographical works, such as birthdate, childhood, career, and so forth. Rather, the details included are those which pertain to the saint's life as an icon of Christ, as one who points us to the abundant life available from our Lord.

The secondary purpose of hagiography is to glorify persons in whom Christ has powerfully worked. Therefore, one often can notice a dearth of mention of the saint's sins in this life. Sometimes, those sins are mentioned (as with St. Mary of Egypt or the Prophet King David ) so that their great repentance can be demonstrated, but other times, hagiography includes no mention of the saint's sins at all. This character of the genre should not be understood as propaganda—after all, it is axiomatic that only Christ is without sin—but rather that such details are not germane to the purpose of hagiography.

Development of hagiography

Hagiography comprised an important literary genre in the early millennia of the Church, providing informational history as well as inspirational stories and legends. A hagiographic account of an individual saint is often referred to as a vita or life .

The genre of lives of the saints first came into being in the Roman Empire as collections of traditional accounts of Christian martyrs , called martyrologies . In the 4th century, there were 3 main types of catalogues of lives of the saints:

• Menaion , an annual calendar catalogue (in Greek, μηναίον menaios means "month") (biographies of the saints to be read at sermons )
• Synaxarion , or a short version of lives of the saints, arranged by dates
• Paterikon (in Greek, πατήρ pater means "father"), or biography of the specific saints, chosen by the catalogue compiler

In Western Europe hagiography was one of the more important areas in the study of history during the Middle Ages. The Golden Legend of Jacob de Voragine compiled a great deal of mediæval hagiographic material, with a strong emphasis on miracle tales.

In the 10th century, the work of St. Simeon Metaphrastes —an Orthodox monk who had been a secretary of state—marked a major development and codification of the genre. His Menologion (catalogue of lives of the saints), compiled at the request of Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus while Simeon was still a civil servant, became the standard for all of the Western and Eastern hagiographers. Over the years, hagiography as a genre 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. Simeon's contribution was to collect these saints' lives from written and oral traditions, copying directly from some sources and reworking others, then arranging them in order of the saints' feast days.

The genre of lives of the saints was brought to Russia by the South Slavs together with writing and also in translations from the Greek language. In the 11th century, the Russians began to compile the original life stories of the first Russian saints. In the 16th century, Metropolitan Macarius expanded the list of the Russian saints and supervised the compilation of their life stories. They would all be compiled in the so called Velikiye chet'yi-minei catalogue (Великие Четьи-Минеи, or "Grand monthly readings"), consisting of 12 volumes in accordance with each month of the year.

Even though some of the writings seem to contain embellishments, as one may assume when reading of the life of St. Nicholas of Myra , they are still quite useful. In the words of Fr. Thomas Hopko :

• Article adapted from Wikipedia:Hagiography
• The Orthodox Faith Written by the V. Rev. Thomas Hopko ( OCA web site )

External links

• The Great Collection of the Lives of the Saints English translation of the work by Saint Demetrius of Rostov from Chrysostom Press
• Great Synaxaristes - Lives of Saints English translation from Greek from Holy Apostles Convent and Dormition Skete

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hagiography noun

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What does the noun hagiography mean?

There are three meanings listed in OED's entry for the noun hagiography . See ‘Meaning & use’ for definitions, usage, and quotation evidence.

hagiography has developed meanings and uses in subjects including

How common is the noun hagiography ?

How is the noun hagiography pronounced, british english, u.s. english, where does the noun hagiography come from.

Earliest known use

The earliest known use of the noun hagiography is in the mid 1600s.

OED's earliest evidence for hagiography is from 1631, in the writing of Peter Heylyn, Church of England clergyman and historian.

hagiography is a borrowing from Latin.

Etymons: Latin hagiographia .

Nearby entries

• hagiarchy, n. 1826–
• hagi-heroical, adj. 1829
• hagio-, comb. form
• hagiocracy, n. 1816–
• Hagiographa, n. a1382–
• hagiographal, adj. 1565–
• hagiographer, n. 1648–
• hagiographic, adj. 1769–
• hagiographical, adj. 1585–
• hagiographist, n. 1799–
• hagiography, n. 1631–
• hagiolater, n. 1872–
• hagiolatrous, adj. 1839–
• hagiolatry, n. 1649–
• hagiologic, adj. 1826–
• hagiological, adj. 1776–
• hagiologist, n. 1795–
• hagiology, n. 1651–
• hagiomania, n. 1807–
• hagio-romance, n. a1843–
• hagioscope, n. 1840–

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Meaning & use

Pronunciation, compounds & derived words, entry history for hagiography, n..

hagiography, n. was revised in September 2021.

hagiography, n. was last modified in July 2023.

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Revisions and additions of this kind were last incorporated into hagiography, n. in July 2023.

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Meaning of hagiography in English

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• exercise book
• novelistically
• young adult

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A scripted speech or broadcast has been written before it is read or performed.

Varied and diverse (Talking about differences, Part 1)

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