The Saint's Life and the Senses of Scripture

Hagiography as Exegesis

Ann W. Astell

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9780268020385, 9780268208110
• eBook ISBN: 9780268208141
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Storia dell'Europa medievale

Through close examination of ancient, medieval, and modern Lives of the saints, Ann W. Astell demonstrates how the historical transformation of hagiography as a genre correlates with similar changes in biblical studies.

Christian hagiography flourished from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries, illuminating the gospel through the overlapping forms of exempla and vita. Originally, the Lives of the saints were understood as hermeneutical extensions of the Bible—God authors the saint, just as God authors the divinely inspired scriptures. During the medieval period, a sense of dual authorship between God and the cooperating saint developed, paralleling the Scholastic impulse to assign greater agency to the human writers of scripture. Then, in the sixteenth century, powerful new anxieties about historical truth pushed hagiography aside for biography, its successor.

Drawing on her expertise in the history of Christianity and biblical exegesis, Astell convincingly shows how this radical shift in hagiography's status—the loss of the literal, allegorical, tropological, and anagogical senses of the Lives—serves as a bellwether for modern biblical reception.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• INTRODUCTION Brief Candle: The Saint’s Life as Biblical Illumination
• PART 1 The Saint’s Life in the Age of Monasticism
• CHAPTER 1 Psalm Use, Prayer, and Prophecy in the Lives of Saint Guthlac
• CHAPTER 2 Hexaemeral Miracles in Saint Aelred of Rievaulx’s Life of Ninian
• CHAPTER 3 The Song of Songs and Saint Bernard of Clairvaux’s Life of Saint Malachy
• CHAPTER 4 Eadmer’s Parabolic Life and History of Saint Anselm of Canterbury: A Twice-Told Tale
• PART 2 The Saint’s Life in the Scholastic Age
• CHAPTER 5 Saint Francis of Assisi as “New Evangelist” in Thomas of Celano’s Vita prima and Bonaventure’s Legenda maior
• CHAPTER 6 Heroic Virtue in Blessed Raymond of Capua’s Life of Catherine of Siena
• CHAPTER 7 Mary Magdalene and the Eucharist: Reading Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda aurea with Catherine of Siena, Raymond of Capua, and Osbern Bokenham
• PART 3 The Saint’s Life in Modernity
• Chapter 8 The Ends of Hagiography: Erasmus’s Jerome, Harpsfield’s Life of More, and More’s Epitaph
• CHAPTER 9 Modern Literary Experiments in Biblical Hagiography
• CHAPTER 10 Historical Truth, Biblical Criticism, and Hagiography
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index