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The Lives of Saints

Hagiography is a genre of literature which describes the lives of saints – particularly stories about their lives, miracles, and martyrdoms. Hagiographies were especially popular in the Middle Ages but we still write them today: one alternate definition of “hagiography” is a biography which is extremely laudatory or praises the subject a bit too much.

jeromeSpecial Collections owns numerous biographies of saints, both medieval and latter-day. The oldest is this book, a life of St. Jerome which was printed in Passau, Germany 1482 (it actually predates the manuscript Life, Death and Miracles of St. Jerome in Special Collections by several years). The most recent is the new biography of President Henry B. Eyring published in 2013!

The quickest way to find a biography in the library catalog is to search for a specific person’s name. For early/medieval Christian saints, you can do a subject search for the saint’s name (for example, either “Saint Jerome” or “Jerome, Saint”).

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