The Golden Legend is a collection of hagiographies

Hagiography

Hagiography is the study of saints.From the Greek and , it refers literally to writings on the subject of such holy people, and specifically to the biographies of saints and ecclesiastical leaders. The term hagiology, the study of hagiography, is also current in English, though less common...

 by Jacobus de Voragine

Jacobus de Voragine

Blessed Jacobus de Varagine or Voragine was an Italian chronicler and archbishop of Genoa. He was the author, or more accurately the compiler, of Legenda Aurea, the Golden Legend, a collection of the legendary lives of the greater saints of the medieval church that was one of the most popular...

 that became a late medieval

Middle Ages

The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...

 bestseller

Bestseller

A bestseller is a book that is identified as extremely popular by its inclusion on lists of currently top selling titles that are based on publishing industry and book trade figures and published by newspapers, magazines, or bookstore chains. Some lists are broken down into classifications and...

. More than a thousand manuscripts of the text have survived, compared to twenty or so of its nearest rivals. It was likely compiled around the year 1260, although the text was added to over the centuries.

A medieval bestseller

Initially entitled Legenda sanctorum (Readings of the Saints), it gained its popularity under the title by which it is best known. It overtook and eclipsed earlier compilations of abridged legendaria, the Abbreviatio in gestis et miraculis sanctorum attributed to the Dominican chronicler Jean de Mailly

Jean de Mailly

Jean Pierier of Mailly, called Jean de Mailly, was a Dominican chronicler working in Metz in the mid-13th century. In his Latin chronicle of the Diocese of Metz, Chronica universalis Mettensis, the fable of Pope Joan first appears in written form....

 and the Epilogus in gestis sanctorum of the Dominican preacher Bartholomew of Trent

Bartholomew of Trent

Bartholomew of Trent was a Dominican hagiographer and papal diplomat. His Epilogum in gesta sanctorum which set a new style in hagiography designed for practical use by preachers, specifically to inspire a lay audience with marvels and moral admonitions, was one of two main sources for Jacobus de...

. Over eight hundred manuscript copies of the work survive, and when printing was invented in the 1450s, editions appeared quickly, not only in Latin, but also in every major European language. Among incunabula, printed before 1500, Legenda aurea was printed in more editions than the Bible

Bible

The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...

. It was one of the first books William Caxton

William Caxton

William Caxton was an English merchant, diplomat, writer and printer. As far as is known, he was the first English person to work as a printer and the first to introduce a printing press into England...

 printed in the English language

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

; Caxton's version appeared in 1483 and his translation was reprinted, reaching a ninth edition in 1527.

Fanciful etymologies

The book sought to compile traditional lore about all of the saints venerated

Veneration

Veneration , or veneration of saints, is a special act of honoring a saint: an angel, or a dead person who has been identified by a church committee as singular in the traditions of the religion. It is practiced by the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Roman Catholic, and Eastern Catholic Churches...

 at the time of its compilation. Jacobus de Voragine typically begins with an (often fanciful) etymology

Etymology

Etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages and texts about the languages to gather knowledge about how words were used during...

 for the saint's name. An example (in Caxton's translation) shows his method:

Silvester

Pope Silvester I

Pope Sylvester I was pope from 31 January 314 to 31 December 335, succeeding Pope Miltiades.He filled the See of Rome at a very important era in the history of the Catholic Church, but very little is known of him....

 is said of sile or sol which is light, and of terra the earth, as who saith the light of the earth, that is of the church. Or Silvester is said of silvas and of trahens, that is to say he was drawing wild men and hard unto the faith. Or as it is said in glossario, Silvester is to say green, that is to wit, green in contemplation of heavenly things, and a toiler in labouring himself; he was umbrous or shadowous. That is to say he was cold and refrigate from all concupiscence of the flesh, full of boughs among the trees of heaven.

As a Latin author, Jacobus de Voragine must have known that Silvester, a relatively common Latin name, simply meant "from the forest". The correct derivation is alluded to in the text, but set out in parallel to fanciful ones that lexicographers

Lexicography

Lexicography is divided into two related disciplines:*Practical lexicography is the art or craft of compiling, writing and editing dictionaries....

 would consider quite wide of the mark. Even the "correct" explanations (silvas, "forest", and the mention of green boughs) are used as the basis for an allegorical

Allegory

Allegory is a demonstrative form of representation explaining meaning other than the words that are spoken. Allegory communicates its message by means of symbolic figures, actions or symbolic representation...

 interpretation. Jacobus de Voragine's etymologies had different goals from modern etymologies, and cannot be judged by the same standards. Jacobus de Voragine's etymologies have parallels in Isidore of Seville

Isidore of Seville

Saint Isidore of Seville served as Archbishop of Seville for more than three decades and is considered, as the historian Montalembert put it in an oft-quoted phrase, "le dernier savant du monde ancien"...

's Etymologiae

Etymologiae

Etymologiae is an encyclopedia compiled by Isidore of Seville towards the end of his life. It forms a bridge between a condensed epitome of classical learning at the close of Late Antiquity and the inheritance received, in large part through Isidore's work, by the early Middle Ages...

, in which linguistically accurate derivations are set out beside allegorical and figurative explanations.

Lives of the saints

Jacobus de Voragine then moves on to the saint's life, compiled with reference to the readings from the Roman Catholic Church

Roman Catholic Church

The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the world's largest Christian church, with over a billion members. Led by the Pope, it defines its mission as spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ, administering the sacraments and exercising charity...

's liturgy

Liturgy

Liturgy is either the customary public worship done by a specific religious group, according to its particular traditions or a more precise term that distinguishes between those religious groups who believe their ritual requires the "people" to do the "work" of responding to the priest, and those...

 commemorating that saint; then embellishes the biography with supernatural

Supernatural

The supernatural or is that which is not subject to the laws of nature, or more figuratively, that which is said to exist above and beyond nature...

 tales of incidents involving the saint's life.

Sources

A substantial portion of Jacobus' text was drawn from two epitome

Epitome

An epitome is a summary or miniature form; an instance that represents a larger reality, also used as a synonym for embodiment....

s of collected lives of the saints, both also arranged in the order of the liturgical year, written by members of his Dominican order

Dominican Order

The Order of Preachers , after the 15th century more commonly known as the Dominican Order or Dominicans, is a Catholic religious order founded by Saint Dominic and approved by Pope Honorius III on 22 December 1216 in France...

: one is Jean de Mailly

Jean de Mailly

Jean Pierier of Mailly, called Jean de Mailly, was a Dominican chronicler working in Metz in the mid-13th century. In his Latin chronicle of the Diocese of Metz, Chronica universalis Mettensis, the fable of Pope Joan first appears in written form....

's lengthy Abbreviato in gestis miraculis sanctorum (Summary of the Deeds and Miracles of the Saints) and the other is Bartholomew of Trent

Bartholomew of Trent

Bartholomew of Trent was a Dominican hagiographer and papal diplomat. His Epilogum in gesta sanctorum which set a new style in hagiography designed for practical use by preachers, specifically to inspire a lay audience with marvels and moral admonitions, was one of two main sources for Jacobus de...

's Epilogum in gesta sanctorum(Afterword on the Deeds of the Saints). The many extended parallels to text found in Vincent de Beauvais' Speculum historiale, the main encyclopedia that was used in the Middle Ages, are attributed by modern scholars to the two authors' common compilation of identical sources, rather than to Jacobus' reading Vincent's encyclopedia. More than 130 more distant sources have been identified for the tales related of the saints in the Golden Legend, few of which have a nucleus in the New Testament

New Testament

The New Testament is the second major division of the Christian biblical canon, the first such division being the much longer Old Testament....

 itself; these hagiographic

Hagiography

Hagiography is the study of saints.From the Greek and , it refers literally to writings on the subject of such holy people, and specifically to the biographies of saints and ecclesiastical leaders. The term hagiology, the study of hagiography, is also current in English, though less common...

 sources include apocrypha

Apocrypha

The term apocrypha is used with various meanings, including "hidden", "esoteric", "spurious", "of questionable authenticity", ancient Chinese "revealed texts and objects" and "Christian texts that are not canonical"....

l texts such as the Gospel of Nicodemus, and the histories of Gregory of Tours

Gregory of Tours

Saint Gregory of Tours was a Gallo-Roman historian and Bishop of Tours, which made him a leading prelate of Gaul. He was born Georgius Florentius, later adding the name Gregorius in honour of his maternal great-grandfather...

 and John Cassian. Many of his stories have no other known source. A typical example of the sort of story related, also involving St. Silvester, shows the saint receiving miraculous instruction from Saint Peter

Saint Peter

Saint Peter or Simon Peter was an early Christian leader, who is featured prominently in the New Testament Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles. The son of John or of Jonah and from the village of Bethsaida in the province of Galilee, his brother Andrew was also an apostle...

 in a vision

Vision (religion)

In spirituality, a vision is something seen in a dream, trance, or ecstasy, especially a supernatural appearance that conveys a revelation.Visions generally have more clarity than dreams, but traditionally fewer psychological connotations...

 that enables him to exorcise

Exorcism

Exorcism is the religious practice of evicting demons or other spiritual entities from a person or place which they are believed to have possessed...

 a dragon

Dragon

A dragon is a legendary creature, typically with serpentine or reptilian traits, that feature in the myths of many cultures. There are two distinct cultural traditions of dragons: the European dragon, derived from European folk traditions and ultimately related to Greek and Middle Eastern...

:

In this time it happed that there was at Rome a dragon in a pit, which every day slew with his breath more than three hundred men. Then came the bishops of the idols unto the emperor and said unto him: O thou most holy emperor, sith the time that thou hast received Christian faith the dragon which is in yonder fosse or pit slayeth every day with his breath more than three hundred men. Then sent the emperor for S. Silvester and asked counsel of him of this matter. S. Silvester answered that by the might of God he promised to make him cease of his hurt and blessure of this people. Then S Silvester put himself to prayer, and S. Peter appeared to him and said: "Go surely to the dragon and the two priests that be with thee take in thy company, and when thou shalt come to him thou shalt say to him in this manner: Our Lord Jesu Christ which was born of the Virgin Mary, crucified, buried and arose, and now sitteth on the right side of the Father, this is he that shall come to deem and judge the living and the dead, I commend thee Sathanas that thou abide him in this place till he come. Then thou shalt bind his mouth with a thread, and seal it with thy seal , wherein is the imprint of the cross. Then thou and the two priests shall come to me whole and safe, and such bread as I shall make ready for you ye shall eat."

Thus as S. Peter had said, S. Silvester did. And when he came to the pit, he descended down one hundred and fifty steps, bearing with him two lanterns, and found the dragon, and said the words that S. Peter had said to him, and bound his mouth with the thread, and sealed it, and after returned, and as he came upward again he met with two enchanters which followed him for to see if he descended, which were almost dead of the stench of the dragon, whom he brought with him whole and sound, which anon were baptized, with a great multitude of people with them. Thus was the city of Rome delivered from double death, that was from the culture and worshipping of false idols, and from the venom of the dragon.

Voragine had his limits; he describes the story of Saint Margaret of Antioch surviving being swallowed by a dragon as "apocryphal and not to be taken seriously" (trans. Ryan, 1.369).

Miracle tales of relics

Many of the stories also conclude with miracle

Miracle

A miracle often denotes an event attributed to divine intervention. Alternatively, it may be an event attributed to a miracle worker, saint, or religious leader. A miracle is sometimes thought of as a perceptible interruption of the laws of nature. Others suggest that a god may work with the laws...

 tales and similar wonderlore from accounts of those who called upon that saint for aid or used the saint's relic

Relic

In religion, a relic is a part of the body of a saint or a venerated person, or else another type of ancient religious object, carefully preserved for purposes of veneration or as a tangible memorial...

s. Such a tale is told of Saint Agatha

Agatha of Sicily

Saint Agatha of Sicily is a Christian saint. Her memorial is on 5 February. Agatha was born at Catania, Sicily, and she was martyred in approximately 251...

; Jacobus de Voragine has pagans

Paganism

Paganism is a blanket term, typically used to refer to non-Abrahamic, indigenous polytheistic religious traditions....

 in Catania

Catania

Catania is an Italian city on the east coast of Sicily facing the Ionian Sea, between Messina and Syracuse. It is the capital of the homonymous province, and with 298,957 inhabitants it is the second-largest city in Sicily and the tenth in Italy.Catania is known to have a seismic history and...

 repairing to the relics of St. Agatha to supernaturally

Magic (paranormal)

Magic is the claimed art of manipulating aspects of reality either by supernatural means or through knowledge of occult laws unknown to science. It is in contrast to science, in that science does not accept anything not subject to either direct or indirect observation, and subject to logical...

 repel an eruption

Volcano

2. Bedrock3. Conduit 4. Base5. Sill6. Dike7. Layers of ash emitted by the volcano8. Flank| 9. Layers of lava emitted by the volcano10. Throat11. Parasitic cone12. Lava flow13. Vent14. Crater15...

 of Mount Etna

Mount Etna

Mount Etna is an active stratovolcano on the east coast of Sicily, close to Messina and Catania. It is the tallest active volcano in Europe, currently standing high, though this varies with summit eruptions; the mountain is 21 m higher than it was in 1981.. It is the highest mountain in...

:

And for to prove that she had prayed for the salvation of the country, at the beginning of February, the year after her martyrdom, there arose a great fire, and came from the mountain toward the city of Catania and burnt the earth and stones, it was so fervent. Then ran the paynims to the sepulchre of S. Agatha and took the cloth that lay upon her tomb, and held it abroad against the fire, and anon on the ninth day after, which was the day of her feast, ceased the fire as soon as it came to the cloth that they brought from her tomb, showing that our Lord kept the city from the said fire by the merits of S. Agatha.

16th-century collapse

The adverse reaction to Legenda aurea under critical scrutiny in the 16th century was led by scholars who reexamined the criteria for judging hagiographic sources and found Legenda aurea wanting; prominent among the humanist

Humanism

Humanism is an approach in study, philosophy, world view or practice that focuses on human values and concerns. In philosophy and social science, humanism is a perspective which affirms some notion of human nature, and is contrasted with anti-humanism....

s were two disciples of Erasmus, Georg Witzel

Georg Witzel

Georg Witzel was a German theologian.-Life:He received his primary and academic education in the schools of Schmalkalden, Eisenach, and Halle; spent two years in the University of Erfurt, and seven months in the University of Wittenberg...

, in the preface to his Hagiologium, and Juan Luis Vives

Juan Luís Vives

Juan Luis Vives , also Joan Lluís Vives i March , was a Valencian Spanish scholar and humanist.-Biography:Vives was born in Valencia...

 in De disciplinis. Criticism among members of Jacobus' Dominican order were muted by the increased reverence towards the archbishop, which culminated in his canonization in 1815. The rehabilitation of Legenda aurea in the 20th century, now interpreted as a mirror of the heartfelt pieties of the 13th, is attributed to Téodor de Wyzewa

Téodor de Wyzewa

Téodor de Wyzewa born as Teodor Wyżewski , of Polish origin, was a leading exponent of the Symbolist movement in France.With Édouard Dujardin he created La Revue wagnérienne in 1885...

, whose retranslation into French, and its preface, have been often reprinted.

Value to students of medieval culture

Written in simple, readable Latin, the book was read in its day for its stories. Each of these is well told, but in mass they tend to become monotonous and blur together, with their repetitious accounts of martyr

Martyr

A martyr is somebody who suffers persecution and death for refusing to renounce, or accept, a belief or cause, usually religious.-Meaning:...

doms and miracles. The book is considered the closest to an encyclopaedia of medieval saint lore that survives today; as such it is invaluable to art historians

Art history

Art history has historically been understood as the academic study of objects of art in their historical development and stylistic contexts, i.e. genre, design, format, and style...

 and medievalists who seek to identify saints depicted in art by their deeds and attributes. Its repetitious nature is explained if Jacobus de Voragine meant to write a compendium of saintly lore for sermon

Sermon

A sermon is an oration by a prophet or member of the clergy. Sermons address a Biblical, theological, religious, or moral topic, usually expounding on a type of belief, law or behavior within both past and present contexts...

s and preaching, not a work of popular entertainment.

The critical edition of the Latin text has been edited by Giovanni Paolo Maggioni (Florence: SISMEL 1998).

A modern English translation of the Golden Legend has been published by William Granger Ryan, ISBN 0-691-00153-7 and ISBN 0-691-00154-5 (2 volumes).

A modern translation of the Golden Legend is available from Fordham University

Fordham University

Fordham University is a private, nonprofit, coeducational research university in the United States, with three campuses in and around New York City. It was founded by the Roman Catholic Diocese of New York in 1841 as St...

's Medieval Sourcebook.

External links

• The Golden Legend — William Caxton's Middle English version (not quite complete).
• Wikisource text with missing page from St. Paul supplied.
• The Golden Legend — Caxton's version, formatted for easy reading (HTML and PDF).
• Illustrations of The Golden Legend from the HM 3027 manuscript of Legenda Aurea from the Huntington Library
• William Caxton's version (complete).