These are typically limited to the personal affirmation of faith together with a refusal to worship the pagan gods and the subsequent condemnation to death. The Passio is a more articulated text, written under Christian auspices, for the purpose both of edifying the Christian community and of acting as a circular letter to allow other communities to know how the martyr(s) remained steadfast in the fidelity to Christ. The Passio typically has a “thicker” rhetorical overlay with scriptural allusions, hortatory interventions, and so on. The Martyrium Polycarpi, is exemplary of the type, although we have many other texts that fit the category.
The legendum (plural legenda) is a expanded story of the saint, often used at feasts at the shrine of a saint or a martyr, but also frequently improvised to exalt the heroic virtues of the saint and his or her patient sufferings under tortures, as well as the miraculous elements attached to the saint’s life and the power of the saint’s relics after death. What one finds quite frequently, in the analysis of saint’s lives, is the tendency to “fill in the blanks.” A particular place may possess the tomb of a martyr or some other holy person, but there is no knowledge of that person beyond his or her name and general reputation. There is an almost reactive tendency to flesh out that person’s story even if few facts are known. Not infrequently, part of that fleshing out consists of adding fictive miracles or folktales or gleanings from popular romances.
At other times, especially in the case of the personae of the New Testament, the “filling in of the blanks” consisted of naming anonymous players in the Gospel story who could make a fair claim to sanctity. Luke tells us that certain women lamented as Jesus carried his cross to Golgotha (Luke 23: 27–31). An early medieval story named one of these women who, it was said, offered a cloth to wipe the face of Jesus which then resulted in a portrait on the cloth (kept as a relic in Saint Peter’s basilica in Rome). Her name was given as Veronica (vera + ikon = “true image”), and she now has a place in the popular exercise of the Stations of the Cross. Similarly, the good thief (Luke 23: 39–43), who was crucified with Christ, received the name “Dismas” in an early non-canonical gospel based, probably, on the Greek word dusme (dying). The same sources name the unrepentant thief as “Gestas.” Saint Dismas is now honored as the patron saint of convicts.
Saintly legends grew apace from the late antique period through the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic traditions and into, and beyond, the Carolingian era. Certain saints “traveled” as their stories and putative relics moved along trade routes, accompanied missionary journeys, and military excursions. Thus, to cite a conspicuous example, devotion to the fourth-century Saint Nicholas of Myra (in present-day Turkey) spread to the West through the port city of Bari in southern Italy in the tenth century and north in subsequent centuries into places as disparate as the British Isles and Russia. Devotion to the saint in the Low Countries became blended with Nordic folktales, transforming this early Greek bishop into that Christmas icon, Santa Claus.1 Likewise, the cult of the sixth-century Irish Saint Brigid of Kildare, who was head of a double monastery of men and women and about whom many elements of druidic customs accrued, was honored in Italy because a ninth-century Irish pilgrim, Bishop Donatus of Fiesole (near Florence) introduced her cult there and also wrote her life in Latin hexameters. Another Irishman, Sedulius Scotus (Scotus = Irishman), introduced her cult in Liège (in Belgium) from where her cult spread to Austria, Germany, and Brittany. In Ireland itself, after her death, the nuns of Kildare kept a fire burning at the place of her death for many centuries, possibly carrying on a custom of female druids before the time of Christianity.
The spread of Islam to Southeast Asia
