HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

154 THOMAS J. HEFFERNANthrough other saints’ lives) for new saints, and, hence, the taxonomyof Christian sanctity was to change only incrementally after the millennium.The saint still had to manifest holiness through a wellestablishedpattern of recognizable topoi: asceticism, miracles, greathumility, and/or pastoral ministry. One notable change in thehagiographies of the high Middle Ages, however, is the increasedpresence of lay people and women as the subjects of Christian sacredbiography. For example, while the early Middle Ages did have anumber of notable female saints (e.g., Perpetua, Agatha, Macrina,Brigit, and Radegunda), their numbers are comparatively few whencompared with their male counterparts. By the early thirteenth century,however, there appears a considerable increase in the compositionof lives of lay (aristocratic as well as non-aristocratic) and femalesaints, possibly under the impetus of the mendicant orders and theirzeal to create Third Orders. It is difficult to consider the life of St.Francis without that of Clare, or the importance to Sweden of Bridget(†1373), the mother of St. Catherine (†1381), and the importance toScotland of Margaret (†1093). Indeed even local cultic heroes whowere not members of the clergy and lived according to their ownrule—individuals like Richard Rolle of Hampole (†1349), Simon deMontfort (†1265), or Juliana of Norwich (†1416), to take three examplesfrom England—were celebrated as saints and liturgies were sometimeswritten for them, despite the fact that they never received officialcanonization from Rome. The narrative tradition of Christian sacredbiography continued to make use of the principle of imitatio and theuse of recursive tropes to bring about anagnorisis in the audience.Christian sacred biography remained strong throughout the MiddleAges and was even used to good effect by the sixteenth-centuryreformers in celebrating their own holy men and women.