This thesis gives an overreaching, detailed analysis of how the Anglo-Saxon cult of St Guthlac of Crowland developed from its modest origins in the eighth century to its summit in the early thirteenth century. It attempts to elucidate the reasons why and how an isolated fenland hermit became the object of widespread veneration instead of drifting into obscurity. In order to consider these reasons, fourteen materials have been chosen from the substantial and varied dossier of surviving Guthlacian materials, to elucidate particular phases or stages in this cult’s development. Ultimately, this thesis considers the function, dissemination, interaction and reception of materials indicative of each author’s adaptation of their subject matter for their patron(s) and audience, and in response to a changing ecclesiastical context. Its central argument is that the adaptability and popular appeal of the Guthlac narrative enabled this cult to benefit from lay support prior to the foundation of a monastic community at Crowland, possibly as late as three hundred years after the saint’s death. This thesis is organized into seven chapters which respectively contribute to a holistic analysis of cult development. Following the introduction, chapter two seeks to draw attention to the variety and import of the Guthlac dossier through an analysis of the historiography relating to their dating, origins and provenance. The purpose of this chapter is to establish a chronology and identify fourteen materials which will be used to define different developmental stages; the Origins, Vernacular Variations, Norman Developments and Longchamp Revival, in subsequent chapters. The third chapter uses a variety of sources to reconstruct Crowland’s historical geography and landscape in order to determine how this context initially and over time affected the development of the cult. It argues that there is no evidence to support that Crowland was chosen as anything other than a site for ascetic retreat within borderlands, both perceived and actual, and that this choice provided substantial challenges to our perception of a cult’s requirements, though none that were insurmountable. Chapter four will proceed onwards to the dossier itself in order to consider how the Guthlac narrative was adapted in response to the changing ecclesiastical contexts defined in chapter three. An analysis of the sources used by these authors and the alterations which they made indicate that there were elements to these texts that were best understood and appreciated by a literate audience, that was likely exclusively monastic. In fact, the authors who were creating new Latin compositions for abbots of Crowland in the years following the Norman Conquest were less and less concerned with creating a text which could be easily comprehended by those with sparse Latin abilities and source knowledge, than they were with meeting the changing needs of successive abbots at Crowland and their progressive designs for the cult. There were nevertheless, other atypical elements found within the origins and vernacular variations phases which are not resolved by this interpretation. Subsequently, chapters five and six explain the social relevance of the heroic and visionary aspects of the Guthlac legend according to contemporary attitudes and accounts. Overall, it will be shown that the cult of St Guthlac of Crowland benefitted from the popular appeal this legend garnered early on, for this enabled it to remain adaptable and relevant until Crowland could take over, with variable results, the propagation of the cult.

The subject of this thesis is the variety of ways that temples were reused by Romans, both Christian and non-Christian, at the end of Antiquity in the present-day country of Greece. It discusses these means of reuse using principally archaeological evidence as a means of countering interpretations of the material culture that temples were either destroyed or reused as churches. These interpretations are based on the assumption that contemporary written sources such as Saints’ ‘Lives’ (the literary genre known as hagiography) are an accurate portrayal of temple reuse in Late Antiquity, without taking into consideration the legendary nature of hagiography. On the other hand, they do not account for potentially contradictory evidence of temple reuse derived from archaeological excavation. It is argued in this thesis that archaeological evidence provides an alternative outcome to that described in contemporary written sources such as hagiography, one that emphasizes practical forms of temple reuse rather than religious. The evidence for this argument is presented at both a geographic level and as discreet categories of forms of reuse of both a religious and practical nature, as a first glimpse of the nuanced image of temple reuse in Greece. Specific examples of the evidence are then cited in a number of case studies to be further developed as a valid attribute in the characterisation of the Late Antique sacred landscape at the level of the Roman Empire. It is concluded that, although practical forms of temple reuse do not greatly alter the sacred landscape of Late Antique Greece, they are crucial in developing a more diverse view of Late Antique religion.

This dissertation explores Jerome’s use of space in the Vita Hilarionis, through the use of the theory of critical spatiality. Three different spaces, all interrelated, are explored: desert space, monastic space and city space. The vita falls within the genre of Hagiography, a short biography that attempts to capture the life of a saint or holy man or woman. The Vita Hilarionis centres around the saint Hilarion, and follows his journey into the desert of Palestine in his goal to become an ascetic. One of Jerome’s goals with the writing of the vita is to show that Hilarion was the originator of monasticism in Palestine. Upon closer inspection of the spaces that Jerome describes to us, his greater ideological goal can also be exposed. Jerome, a Christian with a classical Roman education, makes use of older classical models in order to write his social geography of the late ancient Mediterranean world, such as traditional notions of centre and periphery. However, as theologian, he also reconstructs or re-imagines Roman spaces, such as the circus, to propagate Christianity, the new religion for the old world. Critical space has not yet fully been applied to text in late antiquity (100 – 600 CE) or early Christianity. This approach is steered by insights from social scientific criticism that not only views a text such as the vita as a literary piece of fiction, but also as a social product of its time. Through this view, largely spiritual themes in the vita can be viewed as also ideologically motivated, the social position and role of the ascetic in late Roman/ early Christian society understood, the spaces he/she moves in analysed and applied to shed light on early Christian identities. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria 2015. / Ancient Languages / Unrestricted

This essay is about the works of Jacobus de Voragine, a genoan munk during the thirteenth century namely Legenda Aurea, or The Golden Legend. This essay aims to compare his works to contemporary material as well as modern academic texts. The purpose of which is to see how accurate Jacobus was in his writings, especially when it comes to the early medieval history in the british isles as well as Ireland. The essay as a whole has the purpose of studying the chronology and information provided by these texts in order to see what was right versus what was wrong from the perspective of the modern reader.

Orientador: Ivan Esperança Rocha / Banca: Cecilia Cintra Cavaleiro de Macedo / Banca: Carlos Frederico Barboza de Souza / Resumo: O sufismo, conceito e paradigma acadêmico, conglomera algumas práticas e especulações místicas/esotéricas na religião islâmica. Tradicionalmente, encontrava-se já no momento da revelação corânica e no período de pregação de Muḥammad, sendo reelaborado e institucionalizado, ao longo dos séculos. Entre seus pensadores, Ibn ʿArabī de Múrcia, andaluz que viveu no século XII e XIII da Era Comum, foi ponto de referência, ao sistematizar esse aprofundamento em obras utilizadas por todo o mundo islâmico. Esta pesquisa intenta analisar a vida de santos muçulmanos andaluzes, empregando as hagiografias escritas pelo citado autor, contendo extratos biográficos de seus mestres, para, com isso, perceber como o autor propunha uma via sufi a seus discípulos, cujos modelos retomavam aqueles do Ocidente islâmico, em meados dos séculos XII e XIII E.C. Propõem-se, neste trabalho, uma abordagem histórica do movimento místico islâmico que influenciou um dos maiores mestres do sufismo, bem como uma análise das hagiografias islâmicas e do conceito de santidade do sufismo em Ibn ʿArabī / Abstract: Sufism, concept and academic paradigm, conglomerates mystical / esoteric practices and speculations in the Islamic religion. Traditionally, it was already present at the time of the Quranic revelation and in the preaching period of Muḥammad, being reworked and institutionalized over the centuries. Among its thinkers, Ibn ʿArabī of Murcia, Andalusian who lived in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries of the Common Era, was a point of reference when systematizing this deep understanding in works used throughout the Islamic world. This research seeks to analyze the life of Andalusian Islamic saints, using the hagiographies written by the mentioned author, containing biographical extracts of their masters, in order to understand how the thought and the Sufi way were organized in the Islamic West in the middle of the XII century and XIII EC. This work proposes a historical approach to the Islamic mystical movement that influenced one of the greatest masters of Sufism, as well as the proposition of an analisis of Islamic hagiographies and the concept of sanctity of Sufism in Ibn ʿArabī view / Mestre

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Though much has been made of Chaucer's saintly characters, relatively little has been made of Chaucer's approach to hagiography. While strictly speaking Chaucer produced only one true saint's life (the Second Nun's Tale), he was repeatedly intrigued and challenged by exemplary literature. The few studies of Chaucer's use of hagiography have tended to claim either his complete orthodoxy as hagiographer, or his outright parody of the genre. My study mediates the orthodoxy/parody split by viewing Chaucer as a serious, but self-conscious, hagiographer, one who experimented with the possibilities of exemplary narrative and explored the rhetorical tensions intrinsic to the genre, namely the tensions between transcendence and imminence, reverence and identification, and epideictic deliberative discourse.

While the development of hagiography over time has long attracted the attention of medievalists, scholars have not fully explored the critical role of the liturgy in prompting and transmitting these changes. This dissertation examines the liturgies for the patron saints of three musical and ecclesiastical centers in medieval Aquitaine: the cathedrals of Saint-Trophime in Arles, Saint-Just-et-Saint-Pasteur in Narbonne, and Saint-Étienne in Toulouse. Through the music, texts, and ritual actions of the liturgy, the clerical communities of these three institutions reinforced some aspects of their patron saint's legendary biography and modified others. Yet the process unfolded differently at each cathedral, revealing the particular preferences of the canons of each community as well as their changing circumstances during the Middle Ages. In Arles, the office for St. Trophime, which was likely composed at the cathedral, shows dramatic changes in the saint's hagiography. The clerics in Narbonne also composed an office for their patron saints but did not substantially change the details of Justus and Pastor's legendary biography. In Toulouse, the canons selected from among the preexisting repertoire of chants and texts available for St. Stephen, crafting liturgies that were particular to Saint-Étienne within a clearly Aquitanian context. By revealing the ways in which the clerics of Saint-Trophime, Saint-Just, and Saint-Étienne shaped the legendary biographies of their patron saints, my work provides new insights into the ways in which clerical communities throughout Latin Christendom shaped and reshaped the hagiographic portraits of their patron saints through the creation, compilation, and celebration of new liturgies.

This thesis takes the hagiographical texts written in the diocese of Liège between approximately 700 and 980 and examines them in their political, social and cultural context. It analyses the texts by paying particular attention to how the authors expressed their concerns about issues that were important to them through the medium of hagiography and the saints' cults, the purposes for which the texts were employed and how these aims were reflected in the retelling of saints' legends. By taking this approach, analysing a substantial body of valuable but under-studied source material over a period of 3 centuries, for an important region, it provides a new perspective on a range of issues, significant people and places. The regional approach helps to show the close interconnectedness between many of these people, places and texts, including those connections that exist over a period of centuries as well as those networks vital to early mediaeval society that existed between contemporaries. Close examination of the body of texts highlights the importance of the cult of saints at all levels of society and demonstrates the value and versatility of hagiography as a means of storytelling.

This thesis examines the depiction of saintly figures within the Latin vitae of twelfth-century England (1066–c.1215). It tests the extent to which these depictions are homogeneous and examines what factors may have shaped representations. Analysis focuses on vitae of twelfth-century saints, a sample of texts that have not previously been examined as a corpus in this way. By encompassing a range of different types of saint, authors and contexts, utilising this corpus allows a comparative examination of how different facets of sainthood could be expressed in hagiography. The textual analysis at the heart of this study aims to unpick individual texts' ideals of saintly behaviour. Whilst hagiographers functioned within a well-established genre, considering a wide range of saints' vitae allows scrutiny of the impact of context in shaping depictions. It will be argued that these portrayals of saintly figures demonstrate thematic harmony which is tempered by individuality and context to form recognisable and yet distinctive depictions of sainthood. The analysis is structured around four common hagiographical themes, each worthy of detailed examination: Outer Appearance, Sexuality and Chastity, Food and Fasting, and Death. Chapter 1 investigates how saintly figures are described in terms of physical appearance, deportment and demeanour, and clothing. Chapter 2 focuses upon sexuality, exploring the manifestations of chastity and virginity within the Lives and testing how this might vary from saint to saint and between the sexes. Chapter 3 examines food and food abstention, previously under-represented in secondary literature on twelfth-century hagiography and on male saints. The thesis ends with a consideration of death, a surprisingly understudied theme in Anglophone scholarship. By examining the process of dying and the moment of mortality, this chapter will fill an important analytical vacuum between lived sanctity and sanctity in death.