Eulalie, dates to 878–82. Another early work, the Vie de saint Léger, is from the 10th
century.
The main source for the French saints’ lives is the “official” Latin hagiographic
literature, often going back to latinized Byzantine and other eastern Christian writings.
Though most of the Lives date from the early centuries of Christianity, many told the
stories of more recent saints. Thus, the popular cult of St. Thomas Becket (1118–1170)
found its French expression in at least three vies in verse, contemporary with his
martyrdom. The same can be said of the Lives of SS.Dominic, Francis of Assisi, and
Elizabeth of Hungary. But hagiography was also capable of finding its inspiration in
history, folklore, romances, and even in truly adventitious sources. Barlaam et Josaphat
is apparently a Christian recasting of the legend of Buddha. Conversely, saints’ lives
profoundly influenced other genres of medieval French literature, particularly the very
concept of the hero. Not only Roland, Oliver, and Guillaume d’Orange but also Perceval,
Lancelot, and Galahad became, so to speak, “canonized.” Countless pilgrims visited the
purported graves of these epic and romance heroes, who grew increasingly idealized and
saintly with the development of Arthurian romance.
The Lives do not exhibit a specific literary form but adopt the formal properties of
other popular genres. The oldest extant version of the Vie de saint Alexis (ca. 1050), a
masterpiece of verse hagiography, is in five-line decasyllabic monoassonanced stanzas
closely resembling the basic form of the chanson de geste. In the 13th century, when
most of the verse saints’ lives were composed, not only the prevailing meter (rhymed
octosyllabic couplets) but also the prevailing novelistic tone were shared by hagiographic
and romance narratives.
The distinction between the verse and prose Lives is not merely formal. Those in verse
are generally older and of greater literary value, taking more liberty with their sources
and tending to stress the marvelous character of the narration. Many hagiographic verse
narratives exist in more than one version. The Alexis, as well as the Lives of SS. Bon,
Brendan, Eustace, George, Laurent, Agatha, Catherine of Alexandria, Elizabeth of
Hungary, Mary the Egyp-tian, Margaret, and Thaïs—to name but a few—were recast in
verse several times. Some of them were later prosified, transformed into dramatic forms
in the miracle and saint plays, or both.
Most of the earlier verse Lives were composed as isolated works, but some were later
gathered in collections called “legendaries” (légendiers); the majority of prose Lives in
the legendaries appeared in the first half of the 13th century. Some of the prose Lives are
simply recastings of earlier poems, but most are new translations from more authentic
Latin texts or reworkings of those translations. With the prose translations came a marked
concern for the “truth,” with less “romantic” and fabulous versions of the stories, more
closely resembling the Latin texts.
Parallel to their Latin counterparts, the legendaries were organized either in the
traditional generic “hierarchical” groupings (Apostles, doctors, martyrs, virgins, widows,
etc.) or were arranged in the order of the liturgical year, with a prescribed legend (i.e.,
reading) for a specific calendar day of the commemoration of the given saint. The most
famous of such collections is the Legenda aurea, compiled ca. 1261–67 by Jacobus of
Voragine and translated into French by Jean Beleth sometime in the 14th century and by
Jean de Vignay in 1348. Beleth’s version became the basic text of the incunabula; Jean’s
was a veritable bestseller, with a large number of manuscripts extant.
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