Description
More than half a century after its publication (1953) René Aigrain’s L’hagiographie remains the reference manual for anyone whishing to be initiated into the critical study of hagiography. The structure of the book is threefold: starting with a typology of the sources (which are not only saints’ lives, but also calendars, martyrologies, etc.), it continues with an exposition of the method, as it was developed by the Bollandist H. Delehaye, and it ends with a concise history of the genre “hagiography” from the Acts of the Martyrs to the present times — a real tour de force, without any equivalent elsewhere. An important bibliographic supplement (100 pages) has been added, thus connecting Aigrain’s manual with today’s research.
