Dead Authors and Living Saints: Community, Sanctity, and the Reader Experience in Medieval Hagiographical Narratives

Abstract

In this paper, the ‘Gesta Sanctorum Rotonensium’, a ninth-century foundation legend of the Breton monastery of Redon, and the ‘Vita Geraldi’, a hagiography of St Gerald of Aurillac, serve as a point of departure for a discussion of how the experience of reading shaped early medieval communities. By realigning communal forms of hagiographic texts as media, the authors identify and analyse the parts of those texts where the meta-narrative is carefully inserted. By calling into question ideas of both authorship and audience in the hagiographical context, this paper shows how the use of topoi in those texts created a reading experience that was rooted in the local small worlds of the monastic communities and also connected them to the universal world of Christendom. Finally, the authors show that a narratological analysis of community-creation in early medieval hagiographic texts can also help us better understand how those communities experienced their relationship with God.