Hagiography and Female Saints' Lives

Hagiography was one of the most prolific narrative genres in the Middle Ages. Jacobus de Voragine's Legenda aurea, or Golden Legend (c. 1260), the most popular and widely disseminated hagiographic compendium, was translated into every language in Western Europe making it one of the most often published works in Europe during the first one hundred years of print. As one scholar has noted, this thirteenth-century work about the saints and celebrations of the Church was almost a cultural institution and a ‘medieval bestseller’ (Reames 1985: 3, 18). In the medieval Iberian peninsula, the number of conserved hagiographic documents dwarfs those belonging to other narrative genres (Baños Vallejo 2003: 9). Yet, despite their leading position amongst written narrative, the twelve extant Castilian collections of saints' lives, or santorales, reworked from Voragine's compendium in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, remain largely unedited. The lack of interest that the santorales have generated is arguably due to a greater interest in the verse lives (such as the poems of the thirteenth-century Riojan poet Gonzalo de Berceo and the anonymous poem the Vida de santa María Egipciaca), deemed literary classics at the expense of their prose counterparts, and to the perceived proximity of the prose lives to their Latin source – assumptions that fail to account for the changes and decisions made in the process of translating the lives into the vernacular and subsequent reworking in the Castilian.