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Eric Brook, California Baptist University, Riverside'
The renewal of interest in hagiography and the lives of the saints in the last fifty years typically has not been concerned with hagiographical texts as forms of historical writing in their own right. Instead, it has dealt with them in an almost "positivist" fashion by "quarrying [them] for nuggets of 'hard' information" and reading them with "purist concerns" for historical "authenticity."2 The assumption here is that there is a historicity to be found in hagiographie texts as sources, but that to find "real" history in them one must read between the lines.3 On such terms only have modern historians accepted the possibility of gleaning reliable historical knowledge from hagiographies. "As long as a text is forthcoming with information," Paul Magdalino observed of such scholars, "they are reasonably confident that they can distinguish between the spurious or the massaged and the authentic."4 The "authentic" here is typically understood to be the kind of information that will help elucidate the historical context of the cult of the saints, thus giving us a better understanding of the periods of time - such as Late Antiquity, the Early Middle Ages, or Byzantium - when hagiography flourished. But, crucially for this approach, the hagiographie texts themselves are not taken to be legitimate forms of historical representation in their own right and on their own terms.
Some recent scholars have made overtures to give a hearing to hagiographie works as texts; however, such scholars usually are uninterested in the historicity of hagiographie texts and approach them instead from a purely literary standpoint.5 Thus they segregate as separate fields of labor the analysis of hagiographie works as "sources" of history and as "texts" of literature, the work being performed either by different scholars or as two distinct fields of research for the same scholar. Hence, history is assumed to be something other than what is contained in hagiography, which is usually taken to be untrustworthy legends unless some sort of critical research can uncover the authentic historicity "behind" the text. This is true even in the case of historians of religion who are interested in the religious experiences, practices, and ideas of the saints and those who drew inspiration from them. In short, hagiographies are...