Abstract

The corpus of saints' lives surviving from the medieval period forms an enormous body of material which, as has long been recognized, demands the application of a specialized critical apparatus. Hagiographical vitae must be mastered as a genre, a kind of writing with its own conventions and topoi. But this should not lead to the conclusion that vitae are timeless, that they can be plucked at random from any period of the past and placed indifferently under the lens of informed hagiological scrutiny. Saints' lives are both part of a genre of immense longevity and the products of individual circumstances and environments. The situation which brings this out most clearly is the rewriting of a vita, and it is the purpose of this paper to explore the rewriting of two saints' lives at the end of the twelfth century and to see what the process reveals