A new book by a medievalist scholar Ann W. Astell

MJ. Smith
MJ. Smith MVP Posts: 53,955
edited November 2024 in English Forum

The Saint's Life and the Senses of Scripture: Hagiography as Exegesis by Ann W. Astell | Logos for voting

This book has finally been released and is even better than I expected.

amazon blurb said:

Through close examination of ancient, medieval, and modern Lives of the saints, Ann W. Astell demonstrates how the historical transformation of hagiography as a genre correlates with similar changes in biblical studies.

Christian hagiography flourished from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries, illuminating the gospel through the overlapping forms of exempla and vita. Originally, the Lives of the saints were understood as hermeneutical extensions of the Bible―God authors the saint, just as God authors the divinely inspired scriptures. During the medieval period, a sense of dual authorship between God and the cooperating saint developed, paralleling the Scholastic impulse to assign greater agency to the human writers of scripture. Then, in the sixteenth century, powerful new anxieties about historical truth pushed hagiography aside for biography, its successor.

Drawing on her expertise in the history of Christianity and biblical exegesis, Astell convincingly shows how this radical shift in hagiography’s status―the loss of the literal, allegorical, tropological, and anagogical senses of the Lives―serves as a bellwether for modern biblical reception.

Even the chapter titles show that this is a book on scripture lived as well as interpreted:

  • Psalm Use, Prayer, and Prophecy in the Lives of Saint Guthlac
  • Hexaemeral Miracles in Saint Aelred of Rievaulx's Life of Ninian
  • The Song of Songs and Saint Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of Saint Malachy
  • Saint Francis of Assisi as "New Evangelist" in Thomas of Celano's Vita prima and Bonaventure's Legenda maior
  • and several more ...

Note that she is also the author of:

Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."

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