HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

LATER MEDIEVAL INSTITUTIONAL HISTORY 295duction of saints’ catalogues for liturgical and pastoral purposes, eitherintegrated in their chronicles 60 or separately, in independent works.In this context we can refer to (predominantly Dominican) standardisedabbreviated legendaries, 61 such as the Epilogus in gesta sanctorum(1245) of Bartholomew of Trent and the most famous of them all:the Legenda aurea of Jacob of Voragine (†1298). With these and severalother large-scale mendicant legendaries, trimmed to function inliturgical settings and as instruments for preaching and devotionalreading, mendicant hagiographers moved far beyond the folds ofinstitutional hagiography. 62III.2Franciscan order chroniclesAside from these various hagiographic texts, the mendicant orderssoon engaged in the production of various types of order history, beit catalogues of leaders (Dominican generals or Franciscan generalministers), or more encompassing chronicles devoted to the historyof mendicant convents, provinces, or the respective orders as a whole.Meant for use within the order, Franciscan order histories providedthe friars with useful information concerning their predecessorswho had helped to bring the order into prominence. These textsabound in miracle stories and eulogies of the order founder and his60Cf. the extensive saints’ catalogue in the Satyrica Historia of Paulinus of VeniceOFM, made accessible by a separate thematic-alphabetical index and sophisticatedcross-reference systems.61The tradition to compose large saints’ catalogues went as far back as the sixthcentury. From the eleventh century onwards such catalogues developed into giganticlegendaries. Witness the thirteenth-century legendary of St. Maximin, the Sanctilogiumsive speculum legendarum of the abbey of St. Denis, the Catalogus sanctorum et gestorumeorum (ca. 1370) of Petrus Natalis, the Collectarium sanctorum monachorum of the laterabbot William of S. Paolo fuori le mure in Rome (written between 1372 and 1382),the lost legendary of Gilles van Damme (†1463) from the Cistercian monastery ofDunes, and the giant Sanctilogium of Jan Gielemans (†1487), which is heavily dependentupon the former. See Philippart (1977); Vauchez (1981), 666–67; Dubois andLemaitre (1993), 27–54.62See for example Dondaine (1946), 53–102; Abate (1949), 269–92; Kunze (1983),448–66 (with a lot of information on the various vernacular adaptations); Boureau(1984) (which present the Dominicans as the inventors of the “légendier hagiographiqueuniversel de grande diffusion”); Fleith (1991); Dunn-Lardeau (1986); Kaeppeli(1970–93), 1:172 ff., 2:349–69, 473–74, and 4:46–47, 139–41; Guerrieri (1933),198–241; as well as the new edition of the Legenda Aurea: Iacopo da Varazze, LegendaAurea, ed. Giovanni Paolo Maggioni, 2 vols. (Florence, 1998).