Saints and Hagiographies of the Medieval World

Undergraduate / Graduate

The cult of saints became a popular religious phenomenon in Late Antiquity, with wide-ranging cultural and social ramifications. From a scholarly perspective, one of the more notable consequences of the cult of saints was the emergence of a robust literary genre that offers rich evidence for medieval society: the hagiography. The tension between the medieval cult of saints as a religious phenomenon and the literary evidence documenting it will stand at the heart of the course. Throughout the term, we will read translated hagiographies from different traditions and geographical contexts, ranging from the Mediterranean world to deep within Central Asia. We will discuss the social, cultural, and religious significance of the cults of living and dead saints and examine analytical approaches to different models of sainthood in Christianity and other medieval religions. In addition to outlining some of the main scholarly resources for studying different corpora of hagiographies in a variety of medieval languages, we will explore significant milestones in scholarship and consider the challenges of researching late ancient and medieval societies on the basis of hagiographical evidence.