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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2024

The Life of St. Julian Hospitaller, or the story of a holy sinner: the hagiographic romance of a criminal penitent

Résumé

In their introduction to their edition in TEAMS Middle English Texts Series of Saints’ Lives in Middle English Collections (2004), editors Gordon Whatley, Anne Thompson and Robert Upchurch expose the criteria for their selection of twelve items divided into eight chapters. The volume is conceived as a legendary history of post-New Testament Christianity that collates among others the lives of a martyr like St. George, of a former barbarian converted like St. Austin, or of the lay founder of the Franciscan mendicant order. Amongst the miscellaneous legends stands out the hagiographic biography of a criminal turned penitent, St. Julian the Hospitaller, whose identity and origins constitute a persistent enigma. The editors of the volume classify him as a confessor, distinguishing him from an apostle or a martyr, which virtually amounts to singling him out. Written in the Middle Scots dialect, as the very title indicates, The Life of St. Julian Hospitaller in the Scottish Legendary (c.1400), the last Vita of the collection (its eighth chapter) testifies to the growing popularity of abbreviated legendaries produced in the wake of the legendarium par excellence, Jacobus of Voragine’s thirteenth-century Legenda aurea, presently translated into vernacular languages all over Europe. The sundry versions of the myth of the patron of innkeepers, ferrymen, travellers and pilgrims bear out the medieval cult of saintly figures, including the most protean like the Hospitaller, who strikes as germane to Oedipus the parricide and Mercury the protector of wayfarers, a holy sinner, namely a living oxymoron that defies classification and whose multifaceted profile fascinated and perplexed authors through the centuries up to 1875, when Flaubert’s short story “La légende de Saint Julien l’hospitalier” was published in Les trois contes. This article will reflect on how the Middle English legend of this controversial saint plays on the porous delineation of the saint’s life and medieval romance genres, and will also interrogate the way Flaubert’s spinechilling tale resonates with the Middle English poem despite a number of variances.

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hal-04598343 , version 1 (03-06-2024)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04598343 , version 1

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Agnès Blandeau. The Life of St. Julian Hospitaller, or the story of a holy sinner: the hagiographic romance of a criminal penitent. Beyond Borders Conference, Université de Strasbourg, Apr 2024, Strasbourg, France. ⟨hal-04598343⟩
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