The spiritual or ideological content, clearly visible in the formal aspects of the French
saints’ lives, is shared with all Christian hagiography, which narrates a personal road to
salvation and thus presents narrative patterns basic to all the genres. Despite their
heterogeneity and their differing aesthetic values, all hagiographic stories present
strikingly similar narrative patterns: unusual birth, followed by a precocious childhood in
the presence of pious parents and/or teachers, separation from the family, life of
temptation and/or sin, conversion, repentance and/or good works, martyrdom and/or
pious death. With the death, often followed by the visible signs of sainthood (miracles),
begins the liturgical (i.e., literary) existence of a saint, a life having become The Life.
These patterns are spiritually and historically explainable. All saints are imitatores
Christi, and those patterns are clearly discernible in the biblical accounts of Christ’s life.
Peter F.Dembowski
The heyday of French hagiography was the 13th century, but approximately twenty-
five verse texts presenting the Lives of saints were composed as late as the 15th century.
Among the saints whose Lives were written in this period are Anthony (of the desert),
Anthony of Padua, Barbara, Catherine, Christine, Denis, the 10,000 crucified, Eustace,
Fiacre, John the Baptist, Josse, Margaret, Mathurin, Onuphre, Opportune, Quentin,
Reine, René, Roch, Sauveur, and Winifrid. We find the same blend as in previous
centuries: there are saints from the early years of Christianity (Eustace, Catherine,
Onuphre), for whom the paucity of documentation has been made up for by invention;
some from more recent times, for whom there is credible source material (Anthony of
Padua); and still others who were near-contemporaries (Roch). There is also the usual
blending of pan-Christian saints with saints more closely associated with France, such as
Denis (bishop of Paris), Fiacre (connected to the abbey of Breuil, near Meaux) Josse
(Toulouse), Mathurin (Sens), Opportune (Normandy), Reine (Autun), René (Angers), and
Roch (Montpellier). Saints not immediately identified as French are found to have some
connection with the country, like Christine, transported miraculously to the neighborhood
of Béthune, or Anthony of Padua, who lived briefly in France.
One-third of these works are in the long-popular narrative form of the octosyllabic
couplet (Christine, Josse, Margaret, Mathurin, Onuphre, Opportune, Quentin, René). The
rest show variety in their verse forms, harmonizing with those popular for the
transmission of secular texts. A good number of these Lives are stanzaic: those of
Barbara, Catherine, Denis, Eustace, and Sauveur, for example, have quatrains of
Alexandrines, a common form in the 14th century. Other Lives use various stanzaic
forms, ranging from octosyllabic sizains (Denis), septains (Catherine), and huitains
(Christine, Fiacre) to eleven-lined stanzas of decasyllables (Reine). When the spirit of the
age calls for feats of rhyming virtuosity, as at the time of the Grands Rhétoriqueurs, these
texts, like the Life of Reine, provide examples of unusually rich rhyme configurations.
The poems range from the fairly short (Christine’s 278 lines) to the more extended
(Mathurin’s 1,294 lines). Incunabula texts tend to be in the middle range, approximately
400–600 lines in length.
These works carry on a rich French hagiographic tradition (over 240 hagiographic
verse texts). The genre’s popularity is explainable partly by its appeal to a broad
audience, rich and poor, male and female, young and old, active and contemplative, with
portrayals of individuals bright, independent, and virtuous, who all show the way to
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 1616