Abstract

The dissertation pursues several aims: firstly, to study the development of hagiography as a literary genre in the Middle Ages; secondly, to define the notion of a hero, especially the military hero, by tracing its origin and transformation through the ages: from the secularization of a god and deification of a hero to the cult of a saint--the saintly hero; thirdly, to make a comparison between the paradigms of the lives of mythological gods and epic heroes and the paradigms of the vita Christi saints' vitae in order to find the loci communis between them, and on the basis of this comparison discuss mythological, epic and ecclesiastical perspectives on the image of the saint in medieval hagiography. ;According to Giambattista Vico's New Science, the world has passed through four periods, or ages: the age of the giants, gods, heroes and men. With the victory of Christianity in the Middle Ages, we witness the inauguration of a new age within the age of men--the age of the saintly heroes. ;One of the main purposes of the dissertation is to explore the image of a hero, its origin and how and why it developed, changed and was transformed from the age of the gods to the age of the saints. ;Another main concern of the dissertation is the meaning of the "saintly soldier" in the Middle Ages. Saints are soldiers of the earthly militia Christi and also, according to the Apocalypse, the "sharp two-edged sword" symbolically interpreted by the medieval theologians as the binary strength of Christianity--spiritual and corporeal. ;The result of the study of the lives of the mythological, epic and hagiographical gods, heroes and saints is a paradigm of the vita of the saintly hero--the life of the composite spiritual and military Christian hero: the Deus, Heros et Sanctus Loci Communis