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In Search of Sacred Time: Jacobus de Voragine and The Golden Legend. By Jacques Le Goff. Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane. (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2014. Pp. xviii, 214. $29.95. ISBN 978-0-691-15645-3.)
For the past two decades, the Golden Legend composed by the Dominican prelate Jacobus de Vorágine-as well as the genre of abridged legendaries (legendae novae)-have been a major subject of scientific research, inspiring extensive studies by scholars such as Barbara Fleith and Giovanni Paolo Maggioni, as well as editions, commentaries, and translations by Maggioni, Emore Paoli, and this reviewer. Following these books, the last major work by Le Goff, the doyen of medieval studies (who died in 2014)-humbly qualified by himself as an essay- investigates a key theme of his broad examination of medieval society: time as a defining factor of the Christian philosophy of life.
The mastering and the "sacralization" of time is, according to this work, the main goal of the Legenda Aurea that defines itself less as a legendary than as a somme sur le temps, or a handbook on time. The interpretation of human history as history of salvation, as well...