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About This Book
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 BibleāGod 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 statusāthe loss of the literal, allegorical, tropological, and anagogical senses of the Lives āserves as a bellwether for modern biblical reception.
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Half Title
- Title
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Tables
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- INTRODUCTION Brief Candle: The Saintās Life as Biblical Illumination
- PART 1 The Saintās 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 Rievaulxās Life of Ninian
- CHAPTER 3 The Song of Songs and Saint Bernard of Clairvauxās Life of Saint Malachy
- CHAPTER 4 Eadmerās Parabolic Life and History of Saint Anselm of Canterbury: A Twice-Told Tale
- PART 2 The Saintās Life in the Scholastic Age
- CHAPTER 5 Saint Francis of Assisi as āNew Evangelistā in Thomas of Celanoās Vita prima and Bonaventureās Legenda maior
- CHAPTER 6 Heroic Virtue in Blessed Raymond of Capuaās Life of Catherine of Siena
- CHAPTER 7 Mary Magdalene and the Eucharist: Reading Jacobus de Voragineās Legenda aurea with Catherine of Siena, Raymond of Capua, and Osbern Bokenham
- PART 3 The Saintās Life in Modernity
- Chapter 8 The Ends of Hagiography: Erasmusās Jerome, Harpsfieldās Life of More, and Moreās Epitaph
- CHAPTER 9 Modern Literary Experiments in Biblical Hagiography
- CHAPTER 10 Historical Truth, Biblical Criticism, and Hagiography
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index