Methodological Basis

CHAPTER 1 Methodological Basis Medieval hagiography is a relatively new field of historical research. Until recently, much more attention was paid to male figures rather than to female princely or royal saints. Moreover, apart from some notable exceptions, female hagiography studies have taken distinctively different paths for Eastern and Western Christianity. This book intends to find the links between both tra- ditions and relate their respective findings on this topic. Hagiography (from Greek ἅγιος, (h)agios, “holy” or “saint” and graphein “to write”) deals with written sources concerning saints.1 Biographies of saints (“lives”—vitae, zhitya), written as a part of their canonisation process, together with the collections of miracles and homilies, represent a substantial part of the narrative historical sources available for the study of the Middle Ages. Thanks to the extraordinary work by the Bollandists who edited a collection of those sources in the seventeenth century, today historians have at their dis- posal the priceless Acta Sanctorum.2 However, the publication of this collection brought to the fore a number of methodological issues, which are still being debated. Several different approaches to hagiographic texts have been proposed so far. In the early twentieth century, Ludwig Zoepf, focusing primarily on tenth century saints, produced the first classification and typology of saints.3 In Marc Blochʼs Les rois thaumaturges,4 attention is first drawn to the significance 1 Klaus Herbers, “Hagiographie,” in Aufriß der Historischen Wissenschaften: Quellen, edited by Michael Maurer, IV (Ditzingen: Reclam, 2002), 190–214. 2 Idem, “Hagiographie,” 192: “Die sogenannten Acta Sanctorum, die den größten Teil die- ser Texte in Druck bieten, nehmen—in welcher Ausgabe auch immer—mit ihren großen Foliobänden sechs bis sieben Regalmeter der meisten Bibliotheken ein. Es finden sich dort allein etwa 4 000 Lebensbeschreibungen von rund 2 500 Heiligen.” 3 Ludwig Zoepf, “Das Heiligen-Leben im 10. Jahrhundert,” in Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte des Mittelalters und Renaissance, edited by Walter Goetz (Leipzig and Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1908), 1–250. 4 Marc Bloch, Les rois thaumaturges: Etude sur le caractère surnaturel attribué la puissance royale particulièrement en France et en Angleterre (Strasbourg: Librairie Istra, 1924), translated into English as The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France, translated by James E. Anderson (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1973). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��7 | doi ��.��63/9789004338�35_003 4 CHAPTER 1 of royal saints in France and England. The same direction5 was also pointed by Ernst H. Kantorowicz in his book on “The King’s Two Bodies.” Both Bloch and Kantorowicz can be credited for a fundamental change in hagiographic studies. From focusing on a positivistic approach intended to extract verifi- able and “true” facts (res verae, que factae sunt)6 from the saints’ lives, schol- ars interested in hagiographic sources have now turned their attention to “fictional facts” (facta ficta)7 and their use. After World War II, a group of historians around Marc Bloch and his close friend, Lucien Febvre, associated with the journal Annales. Economies. Sociétés. Civilisations (Philippe Ariès, Fernand Braudel, Georges Duby, Jacques Le Goff, Ernest Labrousse), developed a new approach to hagiographic sources turning them into a powerful tool for explor- ing cultural and sociological issues. For the first time, those historians treated hagiography as a major source for the study of mentalités. The “linguistic turn” of the 1960s, as advocated in Paris and Vienna, brought in a structuralist approach to the development of saint typology, their deeds (gesta) and miracles (miracula). This approach firmly established hagiographic sources as works of fiction, in which separate elements can be identi- fied. These serve as building blocks for any legend and bear consequent impact on the typology and categorisation of the text. This, in turn, shifted scholarly attention to the particular topoi of legends, their specific function and origin, as well as the timelines and paths of their diffusion. The study of saints’ lives has recently been more influenced by the development of semiotics, especially by the works of Umberto Eco and Vladimir N. Toporov. In short, the post-modernist meta-theory of historical science, especially as fostered in German historiography, has played a key role in the re-assessment of narratives in general and hagiographic sources in particular, and moved far beyond the positivist and/or nationalist concerns of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.8 5 Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The Kingʼs Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957). 6 Verena Epp, “Von Spurensuchern und Zeichendeutern: Zum Selbstverstädnis mittelalterlicher Geschichtsschreiber,” in Von Fakten und Fiktionen: Mittelalterliche Geschichtsdarstellungen und ihre kritische Aufarbeitung, edited by Johannes Laudage (Cologne: Böhlau, 2003), 43–62. 7 The phrase is that of Friedrich Nietzsche, Morgenröte: Gedanken über die moralischen Vorurteile (Chemnitz: Verlag von Ernst Schmeltzner, 1881), 245: “Facta! Ja Facta ficta!”. 8 See for instance Otto Gerhard Oexle, “Von Fakten und Fiktionen: Zu einigen Grundsatzfragen der historischen Erkenntnis,” in Von Fakten und Fiktionen. Mittelalterliche Geschichtsdar stellungen und ihre kritische Aufarbeitung, edited by Johannes Laudage (Cologne: Böhlau, 2003), 1–42..

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