Here is another text that witnesses to the early period of the island monastery of Lérins. Its author, Faustus, succeeded Maximus twice, first as abbot of Lérins and then as bishop of Riez. For his part, Maximus became the abbot after the monastery’s founder, Honoratus, was appointed bishop of Arles in 427 or 428. Maximus served as abbot until 433 or 434, when he became bishop of Riez. Faustus then replaced Maximus as abbot of Lérins, and when Maximus died sometime between 457 and 461, Faustus replaced him again, this time as bishop of Riez. Shortly after Maximus’ death, Faustus preached a homily to the church of Riez that stressed how the monastic virtues Maximus acquired at Lérins were a providential training for his pastoral ministry as bishop of Riez. In fact, Maximus was but one of several Lérinian monks installed as bishops in the 420s and 430s: besides Honoratus becoming bishop of Arles, also Hilary was made bishop of Arles in 430 and Eucherius bishop of Lyons around 434. Of course, Faustus himself followed the same trajectory.

The Life of Hypatius was likely written in the mid-fifth century by Callinicus, the second abbot of the monastery that Hypatius founded across the Bosporus Strait from Constantinople. From a literary perspective, the text is a fairly conventional example of a late antique Greek hagiography; it owes much in structure, tenor, and phrasing to the period’s most well-known hagiography, Athanasius’ Life of Antony. Based on evidence internal to the narrative, Hypatius would have lived from 366 to 446 and would have, along with two companions, set up their community some three miles south of Chalcedon around 400 in an otherwise unoccupied compound that included an apostolic church (that doubled as a martyrium), palace, and monastery built by the imperial official Rufinus. During the early years of Hypatius’ residence here, the site hosted the Synod of the Oak, an event that ultimately deposed John Chrysostom, although Hypatius was personally absent during the trial. Two of the Egyptian monks known as the Tall Brothers – Ammonius and Dioscorus – died during their stay, and their remains were deposited within the church.

Between 400 and 410, Honoratus, the scion of a noble Gallic family, founded a monastic community on the island of Lérins (modern Île Saint-Honorat de Lérins, just off the coast of Cannes in southern France). A charismatic figure, Honoratus inspired many men from Gaul and elsewhere, including his relative Hilary, to take up the ascetic life at Lérins. Some years later, around 427 or 428, when the island monastery had become an unqualified success, Honoratus left to become bishop of Arles, although he died shortly thereafter in 430. His successor as bishop, Hilary, commemorated the first anniversary of Honoratus’ death in 431 with a sermon delivered to the Christian community of Arles on his life and virtues. Having only been in office for a year, Hilary used the sermon to provide a kind of apologia for his own episcopal leadership, presenting himself as Honoratus’ handpicked and personally trained successor. Hilary served as the bishop of Arles until his own death in 449.

Translated Byzantine lives of saints occupied considerable space in the hagiographic corpus of Rus and medieval Russia. But original (non-translated) vitae differ significantly from their Greek models in several respects: the very causes of their subjects’ sanctity (the Rus corpus emphasises saintly princes and founders of monasteries); their extremes of self-mortification (as in the case of Varlaam of Keret); and the extravagance of their feats (such as those of Andrew of Crete, or Petr and Fevroniia). Compared to Byzantine hagiography, the Lives of holy fools are overrepresented in the repertoire of medieval Rus, while female saints are underrepresented in it. In the modern era, Russian literature has drawn heavily on the medieval vitae. This tradition became pronounced in the mid-nineteenth century, but communist writers of the twentieth century also fashioned their heroes in the hagiographic mould.

A substantial proportion of medieval texts consists of other texts. Form therefore needs to be understood on at least two levels, by distinguishing between what can be termed ‘composite’ forms and ‘constituent’ forms. Some composite forms are fairly fixed (the Bible is a composite form); others are quite fluid. Genre, in this textual dynamic, is an elusive and contested notion. As illustrative case studies, this chapter considers two types of narrative: chronicle and hagiography. Hagiography is defined by subject (writing about saints), not by form as such. But hagiographic narratives tend to be produced and reproduced in large-scale composite forms organised according to closed annual calendrical cycles, while chronicles are compilations (often compilations of compilations) organised according to open-ended annalistic sequence. Between them these large composite forms contain most of the individual narratives that tend to be extrapolated in modern editions and discussed in modern critical writings, as literary works.

This chapter offers a survey of the principal Merovingian narrative sources. It covers the key chronicles: Gregory, the Chronicles of Fredegar, and the Liber historiae Francorum, plus their relatives. It also offers a guide to the production of hagiography in the period. Throughout the emphasis is on how we might read the stories in these sources, drawing on the competing arguments that have been put forward by scholars about the nature of the texts. Only by understanding some of the strengths and weaknesses of the common approaches to the narrative sources can readers be armed to approach the complexities of Merovingian history.

The book is devoted to the relationships between Nicene and Homoian Christianities in the context of broader religious and social changes in post-Roman societies from the end of the fourth to the seventh century. The main analytical and interpretative tools used in this study are religious conversion and ecclesiastical competition. It examines sources discussing Nicene–Homoian encounters in Vandal Africa, Gothic and Lombard Italy, Gaul, and Hispania – regions where the polities of the Goths, Suevi, Burgundians, and Franks emerged. It explores the extent to which these encounters were shaped by various religious policies and political decisions rooted in narratives of conversion and confessional rivalry. Through this analysis, the aim is to offer a nuanced interpretation of how Christians in the successor kingdoms handled religious dissent and how these actions manifested in social practices.

The Maẓhar al-ʿajāʾib reveals a remarkable world of female religiosity that went beyond mere “spirituality” and shows that Aghā-yi Buzurg exerted communal leadership, competed for spiritual superiority, negotiated with the Shibanid royal court, handled the community’s finances, and dealt with her enemies. In addition to her direct interaction with the Shibanid court and the Bukharan and Khurasani public and religious authorities, Aghā-yi Buzurg’s wide network of male and female allies active in various regions of Mawarannahr tells us that her community operated not on the margins of society but rather in the middle of major, ongoing social and religious events in early sixteenth-century Central Asia.

Many stories about river miracles and wonders were repeatedly told, retold, and transformed as part of the process of establishing and understanding discussions about moral values, sanctity, and socioeconomic behaviors. This chapter looks at some of these, following the stories over time and space. The section “Reversing the Rivers,” framed around a specific set of narratives involving the bodies of saints, tackles medieval ideas about what is “natural” and the ways that saints were understood as capable of both sustaining and reversing the natural. The chapter ends with an exploration of a series of stories that stretches into the 1100s and 1200s, encouraging readers to imagine themselves transported both backwards to the Edenic past and forward to a future salvation.

By the time Christianity reached Iceland, saints’ lives were already a vast and enormously popular genre of literature well-established across the medieval Christian world. This chapter discusses how Icelandic writers engaged with this genre, concentrating especially on translated saints’ lives in Old Norse. While rooted in and responding to the particular conditions of Icelandic society, these vernacular adaptations and engagements with Latin Christian culture also transported the readers and writers of Old Norse-Icelandic literature far beyond their immediate environs. Beginning with the earliest examples of saints’ lives from the twelfth century, this chapter outlines how the genre developed over time from relative simplicity to a more complex and rhetorically accomplished approach. It describes how saints’ lives intersected with other forms of literature being written in medieval Iceland, including romance and the family sagas, and addresses categories of saint’s life which have received less critical attention: the Marian corpus, the lives of virgin martyrs and Low German translations into Old Norse-Icelandic.

Two versions of the Life of the St. Frideswide (650-727) of Oxford exist, in rather different Latin styles though both written in the twelfth century, one more simple, the other more literary (probably the work of Robert of Cricklade, prior of St. Frideswide’s in the twelfth century. It is on this site that the present Christ Church cathedral was built. Parallel passages are given from these two versions to allow comparisons between the content and the language and style.

Here excerpts are given from an Anonymous Life of St. Cuthbert, bishop of Lindisfarne, and from the Life of Cuthbert written by Bede, both in verse and prose. Two stories are chosen, one about Cuthbert meeting the otters on the beach, and the other about him foreseeing the death of a worker on the monastic estate.A brief excerpt from Alcuin’s poem on the bishops and saints of York shows how he condenses into two hexameters one of the stories recorded by Anonymous and Bede.

Chapter 4 examines one of the most spectacular music-liturgical programs of the fourteenth century: the narrative office for the feast of Saint Mark’s Apparition. A work of enormous rhetorical ingenuity and historical imagination, the Apparitio office, I argue, was a product of the state’s heightened attention to and generative engagement with the cult of relics. Found as a late addition to Basilica San Marco’s thirteenth-century antiphonal (VAM¹), the office celebrated the present-day virtue of the state’s most cherished possession: the body of its patron saint, the Evangelist Mark. Careful comparison between the Vespers office chants and the legend source from which the story derives reveals an inventive process of selection, omission, and invention of texts, and as well as a high degree of sensitivity in musical setting. The result was a compelling public ritual that represented the contract between the body of Mark and the Venetians who venerated him and, at the same time, made a self-reflexive bid for music and liturgy as the means for that contract’s renewal.

Chapter 5 shows how the text–music relationships in the Matins office for the feast of Saint Mark’s Apparition supported the construction of narrative history. Unlike the public-facing office of Vespers, the night office of Matins—an enormous and lengthy complex of readings, psalmody, and chant—offered a robust formal structure on which narrative history could be built up and elaborated. An analysis of the chants and readings from the Matins office reveals the composer’s careful curation of source material and inventive use of the conventional melodic features of mode and melody, showing just how much craft went into the representation of miraculous history in a liturgical format. The composer’s reliance on the technical and medium-specific tools of chant to make Mark “appear” within the office suggests that such formal devices served as viable substitutes for, or representations of, the miraculous. The office itself seems to argue that good storytelling, whether accomplished on the page or in plainchant, could produce miracles merely at the level of form and technique.

At the time of Sebald’s death in December 2001, a cult of all things “Sebaldian” was already emerging among his Anglo-American readership in particular. Since then, his consecration has reached almost hagiographic heights. His reticence in interviews and his reluctance to participate in the promotional circus of literary publishing amplified his posthumous apotheosis. The timing of his death after the release of the English translation of Austerlitz led to his rise beyond art and academia to cult author status. To many readers and even non-readers of his work, Sebald constituted a messianic exemplum of the “good German” and the “prime speaker of the Holocaust”, as well as a model proponent of the nature writing genre. This led to the creation of touristic walking routes that followed in the footsteps of his novels’ narrators, as well as social media reading groups, engendering further abstractions and misconceptions. Parodic articles emulating his style and overblown tributes only fuelled the cult’s fire. The suddenness of Sebald’s rise from obscurity to international stardom late in life, along with his unexpected demise merely half a decade later, ensure his cult status lives on.

This essay explores the specific relevance of hagiography for female readers engaged with the ideals and circumstances of pious lay life. Whitehead demonstrates that the accounts of Hilda, Æthelburga, and Æthelthryth in Bedeߣs Historia are strikingly supplemented by the depictions of female sanctity and powerful female agency in works connected with the eighth-century Anglo-Saxon mission to the Germanic peoples, while sophisticated literary skill is demonstrated by Hrotsvitha, canoness of Gandersheim. The essay demonstrates the long textual life of Bedeߣs abbesses, along with more recent examples of sanctity. Whitehead explores secular and religious contexts, contrasting the Vie seint Audrée, probably written for a courtly audience, with the writings of the anonymous ߢNunߣ and Clemence of Barking and the early Middle English Lives of the virgin martyrs in the Katherine Group, designed for a well-born group of anchoresses in the west Midlands. The essay shows that the lives of women saints continued to be popular reading in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in both lay and religious contexts, including in Benedictine compilations.