Forty Centuries of Christian Writing

The Lives of the Prophets

Anonymous

Short notices on twenty-three prophets — where each was born, how each died, where the tomb is. Isaiah sawn in two, Jeremiah stoned in Egypt, Amos beaten with a club by the priest's son.

The Life of Cyprian

Vita Cypriani

Pontius the Deacon

Written by Cyprian's own deacon within a year of his death, arguing that a bishop who lived well deserves a record as much as a layman who died well, and describing the beheading in the field at Sesti down to the cloak spread on the ground and the coins left for the executioner.

The Life of Hilarion

Jerome · c. 347 – 420

The life of the man who brought monasticism from Egypt to Palestine: sixty-five years of fasting reckoned meal by meal, demons in the form of naked women and howling wolves, a cured chariot horse, and a flight from his own fame that took him across the whole eastern Mediterranean.

The Life of Martin

Vita Martini

Sulpicius Severus · c. 363–c. 425

The soldier who cut his cloak in half for a beggar, left the army because he was Christ's soldier and could not fight, and became a reluctant bishop of Tours.

The Life of Shenoute

Besa

Written by Shenoute's successor: the miracles, the journeys, the confrontations with officials, and an old man who could be heard arguing with God. It is frank about how frightening he was to live under.

The Life of Saint Genevieve

Anonymous

The life of the consecrated woman who is said to have kept Paris from panic when Attila approached, and organised grain convoys during a siege.

The Life of Saint Martin

Vita Sancti Martini

Venantius Fortunatus · c. 530 – c. 609

Sulpicius Severus's prose life turned into two thousand two hundred lines of hexameter by an Italian poet who had come to Gaul after his own eyes were cured at Martin's shrine, and stayed.

The Dialogues

Gregory the Great · c. 540–604

Four books of miracle stories about Italian holy men, the second devoted entirely to Benedict, and the fourth to the fate of souls after death.

The Life of Patrick

Muirchú moccu Machtheni · 7th century

Patrick recast as a wonder-worker confronting druids at the court of the high king at Tara, in a contest of fire and darkness.

The Life of Cuthbert

The Venerable Bede · c. 673 – 735

A rewriting of an anonymous Lindisfarne life, with every episode checked against named witnesses. Cuthbert prays all night standing in the North Sea and is dried by two otters; he clears the birds off his barley by talking to them; he asks to be buried where nobody will come looking for him.

The Life of Gregory the Great

Paul the Deacon · c. 720 – c. 799

The Lombard historian's life of the pope who had sent the mission to the English and negotiated with his own people. It carries the story of the dove at Gregory's ear dictating what he wrote, and the account of the slave boys in the Roman market.

The Life of Willibrord

Alcuin of York · c. 735 – 804

A prose life and a verse one of the Northumbrian who evangelised Frisia, written by his kinsman. Willibrord baptises in a spring on Heligoland, an island sacred to a god whose cattle nobody dared touch, and kills some of the cattle for food.

The Life of Grigol of Khandzta

Giorgi Merchule

The life of a monastic founder who cleared forest in the mountains of Tao-Klarjeti and built a dozen houses there, told with unusual attention to landscape, building, and argument with local nobles. It contains the sentence that Georgia is wherever the liturgy is celebrated in Georgian.

The Life of Queen Matilda

Vita Mathildis Reginae Antiquior

Anonymous

Written for her grandson within a decade of her death: the widow of Henry the Fowler, her almsgiving, her monastic foundations, her quarrel with her sons over what she was giving away, and her deathbed distribution of everything left.

The Menologion

Symeon Metaphrastes · 10th century

The lives of the saints for every day of the year, rewritten in a uniform and polished Greek from older texts of uneven quality.

The Passion of Saint Edmund

Abbo of Fleury · c. 945 – 1004

The killing of the East Anglian king by a Danish army in 869, written a century later from a story Dunstan had heard from Edmund's own armour-bearer as an old man. The head, thrown into brambles, calls out to the searchers until they find it, guarded by a wolf.

The Life of Ulrich of Augsburg

Gerhard of Augsburg

The bishop who organised the defence of Augsburg against the Magyars in 955 and rode out among the walls in his stole, written by a priest of his household who had watched him work.

Lives of Saints

Ælfric of Eynsham · c. 955–c. 1010

Saints' lives in rhythmical alliterative prose for the feasts kept by monks, including English saints alongside the martyrs of the early church.

The Golden Legend

Legenda Aurea

Jacobus de Voragine · c. 1230–1298

Saints' lives for the whole year with etymologies of each name, told with relish and no anxiety about plausibility — dragons, resurrections, and improbable escapes included.

The Golden Legend in French

La Légende dorée

Jean de Vignay · c. 1282–c. 1350

Voragine's saints' lives translated into French for the queen, one of the many vernacular versions that carried the collection across Europe.

Acts of the Saints

Acta Sanctorum

Jean Bolland and the Bollandists

A critical edition of the lives of the saints arranged by feast day, with the sources weighed and the legendary material identified as such.