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Jacques Le Goff. In Search of Sacred Time: Jacobus de Voragine and The Golden Legend, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. 232 pp. $29.95, ISBN 9780691156453.
The Golden Legend (Legenda Aurea) of Jacobus de Vorágine, while not always revered for its artistry, stands unquestioned as one of the single most influential literary works of the late medieval period. Completed sometime between 1260 and 1298, the year of the Dominican friar's death, Jacobus' Legend exists in more than 800 medieval manuscripts and was printed in over 150 editions from the late fifteenth through the sixteenth century when it lost popularity in the face of Protestant and Renaissance humanist critiques of so-called Catholic superstition. Often seen by students and scholars of late medieval culture as a touchstone for the study of hagiography, or saints' lives, the Legend was the best known and most widely circulated collection of saints' lives, or legendaries, in medieval Europe.
Such legendaries proliferated during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, their popularity often connected with the Church's increased interest in lay piety and spiritual education following the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. Thus The Golden Legend, along with other medieval legendaries, has generally been studied and evaluated for its impact as a collection of exempla, brief narratives that demonstrated a spiritual lesson or provided a model to lay listeners of pious living. Like many medieval legendaries, and particularly well suited for the "preaching" Dominicans, Jacobus' legendary is arranged in accordance with the Church calendar, providing relevant exempla for use by preachers in accordance with the Lectionarv. Considering, then, the status of the Legend as the preeminent late medieval legendary, the Legendary of Legendaries as it were, what are we to make of Jacques Le Goff's straightforward declaration in his new, posthumously released monograph, In Search of Sacred Time: Jacobus de Vorágine and The Golden Legend, that "the Golden Legend is not a legendary"?
To start, Le Goff is not exactly the first to make the claim that Jacobus' Legend is not a legendary, or rather is something more or less than a legendary. In fact, he references, in a note to that very sentence, Genevieve Brunel-Lobrichon's 1964 categorization of the Legend as folklore.6 Her definition and others that take a...