Faith & RitualGreek → English
Hagiography
/ˌhæɡiˈɒɡrəfi/noun
The writing of saints' lives, or a biography so admiring it has stopped counting as evidence.
The Greek roots
ἅγιος
hágios
holy, sacred
γράφειν
gráphein
to write
Literally: “writing about the holy”
The story of the word
Byzantine hagiography ran to a formula: noble birth, refusal of marriage, miracles, good death, in that order, which makes the departures from the pattern the interesting part. The Bollandists have been sifting the genuine from the invented since 1643, and their Acta Sanctorum is still unfinished. The sour English sense came in during the nineteenth century, when reviewers began using it for political lives that read like liturgy.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Modern Latin → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
hagiologyhagiographercalligraphy
In a sentence
The authorised biography is hagiography with footnotes.