Agiografia altomedioevale (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 91 or less vigorous censorship of sexual material in fiction at the time of his maturity. Had Forster been able to confront his own reality in his imaginative work without fear of censorship (perhaps a form of success ?), we might have had the realistic novels T. E. Lawrence urged him to write rather than the weak erotic fantasies with which he occupied his imagination. The flashes of violence and tragic absurdity in these reflect Forster's constraints. Openness rather than censorship, public and private, might have allowed him to create a wholly different reality in his fiction or his life or both. P. N. Furbank, working in the difficult role of both friend and biographer, lets the facts affect the reader as they may. He remains calmly objective perhaps in order to let the reader judge independently in this age when standards of sexual conduct are shifting. The effect of reading this "Life" is then suitable enough, for we are once again made aware of that need for tolerance and respect for individual differences which obsessed Forster. Elizabeth Heine San Antonio, Texas SociETÀ Editrice il Mulino, Agiografia altomedioevale, Testi a cura di [ed.] Sofia Boesch Gajano. Bologna: 1976. 304 pp. $15.00. The student of biography equipped with a reading knowledge of Italian will find a valuable research tool in this collection of essays on early medieval hagiography which U Mulino of Bologna has recently added to its History Series. The nine texts, written originally in Italian or translated by various hands from the French or German, were previously published as articles or sections of books by such distinguished scholars as Heinrich Günther, Gian Piero Bognetti, FrantiSek Graus, and Jacques Le Goff. As one might expect, the western continental emphasis is almost complete, for among the essays dealing with localized topics, only one is devoted to Byzantine concerns ; insular traditions are ignored or treated only in passing. In a generous, well-reasoned introductory essay Boesch Gajano provides each selection with rich context so that complex patterns of supplementation , divergence, and polemic emerge. The texts themselves are arranged in chronological order and span the years 1934 to 1968. First place is rightly given to the foremost modem proponent of Bollandist principles and methods, Hippolyte Delehaye. The discussion , drawn from his classic Cinq leçons sur la méthode hagiographique, insists on the two simple "coordinates" necessary and sufficient to 92 biography Vol 2, No. 1 identify the saint: the establishment of the place of death or burial, and the establishment of the date marking the beginning of his cult. Delehaye's impeccable scientific method and his extreme suspicion of the "literary part" of the hagiographie dossier set up his position in opposition to a number of the articles that follow, offering at times a necessary corrective to their less rigorous approaches. In three of the essays the growing modern interest among less positivistic scholars in the properly so-called hagiographie documentssaints ' lives, passions, legends, accounts of translations and miraclesfinds its expression through various methods of approaching this material. The characteristic view of the Czechoslovakian Marxist FrantiSek Graus is presented in a translation of the chapter treating the function of the cult of the saints and their legends from his major work Volk, Herrscher und Heiliger im Reich der Merowinger. Here the legend is seen as "polyfunctional": it not only presents to its often unlearned audience an intercessor between itself and the transcendent world, or perhaps replaces other recreational reading for the more privileged, but also functions as an instrument of propaganda in the hands of an aristocratic learned clergy. By enlarging and enriching the cult of "their own" particularly significant saint, the dominant class thereby ensures its own religious and political monopoly of wealth and power. Graus sees the hagiographie production of the transitional Merovingian period as a mirror for the progressive religious and political developments taking place at all levels of society, until such time that a "symbiosis" between church and state is achieved under Charlemagne . A quite different approach is presented by Karl Bosl in his discussion of the "noble saint," a translation of his essay "Der Adelsheilige. Idealtypus und Wirklichkeit, Gesellschaft und Kultur in Merowingerzeitlichen Sagen...