Hagiography occupies a central place in the history of European culture, and yet despite this centrality, its reception as a significant cultural achievement has at times been undermined by a narrow critical hermeneutic, one that focuses largely on the debilitating flaws of the genre. The goal of this critical practice can be described as at once diagnostic and prescriptive, as scholars attempt to rid the canon of specious documents through rigorous textual and contextual analyses. It is my contention, however, that this critical winnowing, rather than rescuing some hagiographic documents from disrepute, is in fact limited by its failure to adequately account for the medieval concern for representation as a re-presencing of the self within language. Understood through the criteria of contemporary biography, saints' lives are easily read as naive caricatures of holiness, archetypes of faith fitted crudely into human form. Instead, the notion of singular identity should be understood as a focal point for hagiography, one that presupposes important theological, and specifically incarnational, underpinnings. An exploration along these lines will reveal what I believe to be an important function of medieval hagiography; namely, to serve as textual bridges joining the sacred and corporeal realms in coincident moments of human transcendence and divine immanence.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.28043 |
| Date | January 1996 |
| Creators | Cahill, James, 1969- |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Arts (Department of English.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001609583, proquestno: MQ43841, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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