Saints & Hagiography

Includes modern saints' days and patron saints.

What follows is a compilation of the Medieval Ritual Year in England. These days have been compiled from a variety of sources; the purpose for this calendar is to examine the relationships, if any, between these in the appropriate context.

A webpage from a past exhibit on the "cult of saints," one of the central forms of religious expression in Western Europe. Discusses the concepts of the celestial court, miraculous interventions, death & devotion, piety & practice, and patronage & prayer.

Saints' lives are a major resource for anyone concerned with the history of the late ancient world, Byzantium, or the Latin Middle ages. Just as whole genres of ancient literature vanished or diminished, the genre of hagiography became a major form of literary production. Such saint's Lives - or vitae - survive in astonishing numbers. Careful reading of them reveals, as one might expect, a great deal about the religious life of the periods that produced them. Frequently, however, such Lives are also our best sources for basic social and cultural history. They provide information on, among other things:- details of daily life; food and drink; organization of local rural and urban society; the impact of commerce; gender relations; class relations; and even, on occasion, specific dates for military and political history. This page's goal is to present ancient, Byzantine, and medieval hagiographic original texts - in translation and otherwise - along with basic data on the cult of saints.

A bibliography with some starting points for the study of the vast corpus of primary texts concerning saints, as well as some of the more important secondary works (and material which I've found useful). Represents a broad chronological period, from which methodological approaches may then be applied to the study of hagiographic texts.

A research tool for Medieval and Renaissance studies, focusing on people recognized as saints in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The saints indexed here are those you might find listed in the calendars of Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts.

Medieval calendars and saints&#39 ; days.

Historians interested in the "real lives" of individual saints value the earliest texts above all others. But for assessing the later cult of saints in Western Europe, the Golden Legend by Jacobus de Voragine, writing about 1260, achieved dominance in later western hagiographical literature - about 900 manuscripts of his Golden Legend survive. From 1470 to 1530 it was also the most often printed book in Europe.