A hagiography is a biographical document focusing on the life of a saint . Therefore, it is a text that tells the story of a person who has been sanctified.
Someone who creates a hagiography is known as a hagiographer . This term is also applied to name the authors of the books that make up the Bible .
Starting in the 2nd century , hagiography was associated with the development of martyrologies : catalogs of saints and martyrs. Later, biographies of saints multiplied, which were read as sermons and were part of calendars .
It should be noted that hagiography is usually divided into two large categories. Practical hagiography is that developed by a religious need or spontaneously from the cult of saints. Then scientific studies of these works began to emerge, breaking out into critical hagiography .
Sulpicio Severo (to whom the first biography of Saint Martin of Tours is attributed), Prudencio (responsible for texts on Saint Emeterio and Saint Acisclo , among others) and Alban Butler (responsible for a monumental work that collects the lives of almost fifteen hundred saints) are some historical exponents of hagiography.
It is important to note that, nowadays, the concept of hagiography is usually used to refer to the biography of any type of personality that presents excessive praise . A hagiography, in this sense, is a biographical text that lacks any claim to objectivity and only emphasizes positive and outstanding aspects of the protagonist.
Returning to the technical level, within hagiography it is possible to find more than one literary genre . This variety responds to the models of holiness that have achieved the most popularity among believers; for example, the figure of the martyr, the monk and the bishop, each of which had its moment of greatest attention.
Another aspect that influences the choice of a literary genre over others when writing a hagiography is the author's intention. In this way, a martyr act (defined below) carried out throughout the time of persecution was intended to push Christians to give their lives if they were put to the test. The records written from the 4th century onwards, on the other hand, exhibit a more apologetic character.
Let's see below some of the most common literary genres of hagiography:
* martyr's record : any work that reproduces the procedural records by which some Christians were condemned. The narratives of the moment of the trial also fall into this group, which have various levels of elaboration. Typically, the author is contemporary with the events recounted in a hagiography of this type;
* apocryphal writing : it is above all a text that is related to the life of Jesus Christ and the most relevant Christians of the New Testament. The goal is usually to add data to that provided by the canonical texts;
* passion : this type of hagiography recounts both the trial and the moment of death of the martyrs of Christianity. Unlike the martyr act, the authors tend to come from much later than the time of martyrdom they describe;
* life : covers the complete life of the saint, with the intention of describing a model character. Authors such as Suetonius and Sulpicius are reference points for this type of hagiography;
* martyrology : it is a list ordered according to the calendar , where the day of birth of the saints is remembered and, in some cases, certain relevant news about their lives;
* legend : the edifying account of the biography of a saint that was read in the divine office, a series of prayers said around the mass.