The Saint's Life and the Senses of Scripture: Hagiography As Exegesis

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:
Acknowledgments Illustrations Abbreviations Introduction: Brief Candle: The Saint's Life as Biblical Illumination Part 1. The Saint's Life in the Age of Monasticism 1. Psalm Use, Prayer, and Prophecy in the Lives of Saint Guthlac 2. Hexaemeral Miracles in Saint Ælred of Rievaulx's Life of Ninian 3. The Song of Songs and Saint Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of Saint Malachy 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 5. Saint Francis of Assisi as "New Evangelist" in Thomas of Celano's Vita Prima and Bonaventure's Legenda Maior 6. Heroic Virtue in Blessed Raymond of Capua's Life of Catherine of Siena 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 8. The Ends of Hagiography: Erasmus's Jerome, Harpsfield's Life, and More's Epitaph 9. Modern Literary Experiments in Biblical Hagiography Conclusion: Historical Truth, Biblical Criticism, and Hagiography

About the Author :
Ann W. Astell is professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of many books, including Eating Beauty: The Eucharist and the Spiritual Arts of the Middle Ages, and the editor of Saving Fear in Christian Spirituality.

Review :
"Astell reads skillfully, writes lucidly, and is on top of her material." —Barbara Newman, author of The Permeable Self "An original contribution to the field of medieval studies, in particular, but also religious history." —Ian Christopher Levy, author of Introducing Medieval Biblical Interpretation "Astell seeks to frame hagiography as a form of biblical exegesis, shifting debate about the genre into new territory. In this reviewer's estimation, the shift will be enriching for both haiography's detractors and its defenders." —First Things