SAINT LÉGER, VIE DE
. Leodegard, or Léger in French (ca. 616–678), abbot of Saint-Maixent, then bishop of
Autun, was declared a martyr, primarily on political grounds, after the death in 681 of his
enemy, Ebroin. By the 10th century, when the French Vie was composed, his cult was
widespread. The 240-line strophic poem, probably from the northeast, exists in a unique
11th-century manuscript at Clermont-Ferrand, which also contains the sole copy of the
Passion du Christ.
Thelma S.Fenster
[See also: SAINTS’ LIVES]
Linskill, Joseph, ed. Saint Léger: étude de la langue du ms. de Clermont-Ferrand, suivie d’une
édition critique du texte avec commentaire et glossaire. Paris: Droz, 1937.
SAINT PLAYS
. About fifty extant plays in French and Occitan are based on the lives of the saints,
ranging from a few hundred to many thousands of lines. Three main groups of saints are
featured in these plays: the Apostles and other New Testament figures, especially Peter,
Paul, and Mary Magdalene; well-known saints of the early church, most of them martyrs
like Barbara, Margaret, and Lawrence; and the most original and interesting group, the
saints of France, from the patronal St. Denis to the medieval St. Louis, canonized in
1297, and Jeanne d’Arc, already treated as sanctified in the mid-15th-century Mystère du
siège d’Orléans. The most contemporary saint play of all was that of St. Catherine of
Siena, performed in Metz in 1468, only seven years after her canonization. The text,
however, has not survived.
The model for most hagiographic drama is the life of Christ. There is occasionally a
nativity scene, as for St. Geneviève, patron saint of Paris, and almost always a death
scene, violent for the martyrs like St. Barbara, peaceful for the confessors like St. Martin
of Tours, and edifying for all. Although the pattern of ministry, miracles, and martyrdom
is established by the Gospels, the sources for the lives and especially the deaths of the
saints are largely New Testament apocrypha or, more usually, the legenda, Latin
lectionaries used in the liturgy for the relevant saint’s day. Consequently, the plays
exhibit much greater freedom in the treatment of the subject matter than do the biblical
plays, and there is less ready-made amplification in the form of allegory, typology, and
exegesis. As a result, most saint plays are fairly short, with few surpassing 10,000 lines.
A saint may have been chosen as the subject of a play because he or she was the
patron of a community or a church, a trade guild or religious confraternity, or even an
individual. Some plays were linked with local relics or statues, and some were performed
in thanksgiving for safe delivery from pestilence or other disaster. In a number of cases,
we have no explanation for a particular performance in a particular place. In the civic
plays, a comparison of performance records suggests that, whereas a small community
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