Constructing the Image of a Foreigner in the Southern French Vitae of the XI – Early XII Century

During the 11th to the early 12th century the hagiography of Southern Gaul goes through a new stage of rewriting the vitae of the old local saints. New versions of Merovingian and Carolingian texts appear as extended elaborate revisions, rich in details absent from the earlier written record. The origin of saintly characters and the story of their arrival in Gaul is one of the foci of such amplifications effectuated by constructing new biographical details. Now and then an elaborated genealogical legend is created so as to promote the protagonist as saint and the community where the text is rewritten as the place of his cult. Along with claiming the apostolicity of the saint and accentuating their real or imaginary Roman origins, this period witnesses the surge of interest in the figure of a foreigner. In the context of the general quest for ancient authority figures, one can often see local saints and their ancestors depicted as characters of foreign descent. As a rule, such imaginary “foreigners” are envisioned as the bearers of the ancient Christian tradition (Jews, Greeks or Romans) and, only in the second turn, as actually strangers, individuals coming from another cultural milieu. The representation tends to be generalized in the extreme. It involves the exotic attributes of their otherness (unusual names, proximity to foreign rulers, distant place of birth) and the air of authority attached to the origins of those belonging to the nations which witnessed sacred history. Besides, the introduction of a foreigner’s figure may imply the amplification of a vita by a “story within story” narrating the epopee of foreigners on the move (Greeks, Jews and even Arabs) settling in Gaul. All that said, maximum authority and persuasive power of the text is not the only effect hagiographers seek by introducing figures of imaginary foreigners and their backstory. It also goes in line with the newfound orientation of hagiography written in Southern Gaul of this period towards the entertainment of its audiences.

Early Medieval Gaul, hagiographic tradition, genealogy, origin legends of saints, memory construction, imaginary ancestors