Introduction: Hagiography and Lived Religion

Abstract

Present in both everyday life and festive rituals, saints—both officially canonized and unofficially venerated—provide a prime example of lived religion in early modern Catholicism. To early modern Catholics, religious experience was a dynamic interaction between believers, God and the saints. In this chapter, we argue that the study of lived religion, understood as individual and communal participation in religious rituals, performances and other practices, allows us to gain new insights into the experiences and expressions of early modern religiosity, without lapsing into simplifying dichotomies or essentialist interpretations of the past. Rather, the concept of lived religion helps us link individual or communal experience to a larger societal framework. Considering the dramatic rise in hagiographic material in the wake of the Catholic Reformation and its reinforcement of the cult of saints, and supported by the invention of the printing press, we further propose that hagiographic material is ideally suited for the study of lived religious experience both on an individual and communal level. By hagiography, we refer to a multitude of material related to saints’ cults and canonisations, such as vitae (or saints’ lives), spiritual biographies, miracle narratives, canonisation processes, iconography, and drama. It is outright perplexing, how little use early modern scholars have, in comparison to medievalists, hitherto made of this abundant genre. Taking into account the changes and continuities in canonization procedures and their interaction with hagiographic material, the chapter introduces a sample of case studies from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century that illustrate how the veneration of saints helped early modern Catholics to give meaning and shape to their various mundane and religious experiences.