1 - Saints' Lives and Sagas of Icelanders

Summary

Introduction

Today we may think of hagiography as a minor genre, too artificial and unrealistic to merit much serious attention. Medieval writers – it is important to understand – did not see things this way. Hagiography is not only the best represented of medieval genres in terms of manuscripts, but also has the longest continuous history: saints’ lives were composed, translated and copied from the second century up to and beyond the Reformation, and they spread from east to west and from the Mediterranean to the north, as new countries declared their arrival in the Christian world through the appropriation of the cult of saints. It was one of the few medieval genres that all classes of society were exposed to, from the lay person who might have heard them read out in church, to the clerical and the secular élite, who would have read them as part of their personal devotions, either in Latin or in the vernacular. Saints not only dominated the rhythm of the Christian year, through the liturgical cycle of saints’ days, but also permeated the medieval sense of place: their power was channelled through the materiality of their relics and expressed in their patronage of Church estates. While composing saints’ lives was primarily the preserve of clerics, the cult of saints both depended on and served the needs of lay people: the way in which Margaret, a virgin martyr, became known in the West as a patron of childbirth is a striking example of how the needs of ordinary women influenced clerical composition; her life continued to be copied long past the Reformation because women in labour depended on its help. Although saints themselves are typically of aristocratic lineage, miracle collections are one of the few places in medieval literature where the needs of ordinary people matter: single mothers, neglected children, the poor, the infirm. The importance of the cult of saints to medieval people (and to many Catholics today) cannot be emphasised enough.