Some Hagiographical Evidence for Templar Spirituality, Religious Life and Conduct

Abstract

The hagiography of the medieval military orders has long been recognised as a corpus lacking in substance, with the result that hagiographical texts have played a minimal role in examining and explaining the orders’ spiritual outlooks and religious conduct. This is particularly true for the Order of the Temple, which has no obvious claim to any saint in the Catholic calendar. The present article is based on the assumption that a purely hagiological focus on these texts offers a myopic understanding of their historical potentialities as search engines for traces of Templar spirituality and religious conduct embedded in the stories. Focusing on two examples from Portugal and one from Spain, it illustrates how even saints’ lives and miracle collections that were not associated with the Templars sometimes reveal important assumptions about the Order of the Temple’s spiritual values and religious significance, if attention is diverted from the hagiological interpretation of events to the context in which they unfolded. It is from these assumptions, bound as they necessarily are to particular events in time and space, that broader conclusions about patterns of religious behaviour ascribed to the Order of the Temple will be drawn.