HAGIOGRAPHY
HAGIOGRAPHY. In the wake of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, when attitudes to the cult of saints provided one of the clearest boundaries marking the confessional divide for the people of early modern Europe, hagiographers were forced to refurbish and discipline their skills. However, the external spur of Protestant polemic (expressed most brilliantly and influentially perhaps in John Calvin's Traicté des reliques [Treatise on relics] of 1543) was not alone responsible for this development. Far more significant than even the humanist critique by Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540) and other medieval collections of saints' lives such as the Golden Legend (1265) was Roman Catholic liturgical reform. This principally took the form of an extensive pruning of the calendar of saints and lay at the center of the revision of service books such as the Roman Breviary (1568), the missal (1570), and the Roman Martyrology (1584). This was accompanied by extensive rewriting, in the spirit of concision and greater chronological precision, of the short Latin accounts of saints' deeds read out at matins and by the more centralized control of the cult of saints.
Supervised jointly by the two papal standing committees of cardinals, the Congregation of the Holy Office (founded 1542) and the Congregation of Rites and Ceremonies, the reform of sanctity centered on the tightening up of canonization procedure and the closely related imposition of a clear hierarchy of devotion between "saints," who could be universally venerated, and the "blessed," who were only permitted local or regional public veneration. Whereas central regulation had previously been focused primarily on universal cults, particular devotions were now also subject to careful control. This compelled local churches (and religious orders) throughout the Roman Catholic world to account for their cults and devotions.
They did so for the most part by adopting a polemical weapon that had initially been unsheathed by the Protestants—history. The years 1552–1559 saw the publication of four major Protestant martyrologies by Ludwig Rabus, Jean Crespin, Adriaen van Haemstede, and John Foxe. All of them attempted to make sense of the persecution of their fellow coreligionists by inserting their experience in a firmly historical interpretative template. In the case of Foxe (1516–1587), his first English edition of the Actes and Monuments (1563) traced the contemporary Roman Catholic persecution of true believers back from the reign of "Bloody Mary"—Queen Mary Tudor (ruled 1553–1558)—to 1000 C.E.
Similarly, to evoke and justify the antiquity of their devotions, regional and local Catholic counterparts to Foxe and his colleagues deployed not just straightforward saints' lives but also the full range of historico-literary conventions, which contemporaries grouped together under the umbrella term historia sacra (sacred history). Written in both Latin and the vernacular, these included civic chronicle, episcopal calendar, collective biography, sacred drama (both spoken and sung), and topographical description as well as individual saints' lives (which not uncommonly appeared together with hagiographical readings from the relevant office—the religious service chanted or read by monks, nuns, and priests—by way of an appendix).
This renaissance in local or regional hagiography had its universal counterpart in the massive Jesuit initiative that is the ongoing Acta sanctorum (1643ff.; Deeds of the saints). The origins of this work lie with Héribert Rosweyde (1569–1629), in whose regional survey of holy men and women of his native Belgium (at that time ruled as the Southern Netherlands by the Spanish Habsburgs), the Fasti sanctorum quorum vitae in belgicis bibliotecis manuscriptae (1607; Deeds of saints whose manuscript lives are in Belgian libraries), he outlined his idea for what became the Acta sanctorum.
Proceeding according to the calendar year beginning on 1 January, the Acta sanctorum, under the direction of Jean de Bolland (1596–1665), sought to provide its users with the most authentic, philologically accurate (multiple) accounts of the lives of the saints treated (1,170 for January alone). Each account was prefaced by a historical commentary and followed by exhaustive explanatory notes. However, the very scale and learning of this project (fifty-three volumes from 1643 to 1794, providing coverage down to 14 October) should not detract from its utilitarian, down-to-earth purpose. Rosweyde sought to reassert the Roman Catholic identity of the southern provinces, which were then a "frontier" zone bordering the Calvinist northern provinces controlled by Holland, through the celebration of their saintly heritage. What he sought to achieve for Belgium in the Fasti, he hoped to achieve for the entire Christian world (including, by implication, those areas that had recently been lost to the Protestant heretics) in the Acta.
Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621), the leading Catholic controversialist of his age, criticized Rosweyde's plan on the grounds that the Acta, through their very comprehensiveness, would provide too many hostages to fortune for the benefit of Protestant polemicists. Bellarmine held up as models the more selective, if still substantial, saints' life collections by Luigi Lippomano (1500–1559) and Laurentius Surius (1522–1578). The former's eight-volume Sanctorum priscorum patrum vitae (1551–1560; Lives of ancient and holy fathers) provided the basis for the latter's even larger De probatis sanctorum historiis (1570–1573; Proven histories of the saints). Significantly, both authors had been intimately involved with combating Protestantism; Lippomano as papal nuncio to Germany (1548–1550) and Surius as a convert from Lutheranism. Each volume of Lippomano's work contained an index relating particular passages to Roman Catholic dogma, while Surius sought to reclaim for Roman Catholicism its monopoly on the miraculous. Accordingly, the 699 lives he collected included accounts of no fewer than 6,538 miracles.
The latest scholarship has clearly demonstrated the protean role played by hagiography in early modern Europe as a focus of local, regional, or national pride as well as of confessional distinctiveness and spiritual food. To do justice to the very variety of the cultural work it carried out, it is more helpful to consider hagiography as a cluster of related literary genres than as a single one. Similarly, during this (or any earlier or later) period, the writing of saints' lives is more easily defined by its content than its forms, which were as various as its uses. Rather than ask what it was, it is more helpful to ask what hagiography did in early modern Europe (and beyond).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cochrane, Eric W. Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance. Chicago, 1981. See especially Chapter 16, "Sacred History."
Ditchfield, Simon. Liturgy, Sanctity and History in Tridentine Italy. Cambridge, U.K., 1995.
Gregory, Brad S. Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, Mass., 1999.
Soergel, Philip M. Wondrous in His Saints: Counter-Reformation Propaganda in Bavaria. Berkeley, 1993.
