The relationship between santity and sacrality, which had a traditional role in hagiographic study, has in recent decades been enriched on a number of counts: attention to the places preferred in the search for perfection and then sacralized by the presence of the saints; the construction of a sacred geography; interest in the history of sanctuaries, considered through the variety in their origins and of the objects of cult. Diachrony and multidisciplinary are two parameters essential in hagiographic study: the former has been felt in the last few decades as a revision to a chronology which privileged Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages; the latter has its roots in the very scholarly nature of hagiography, if one things of the relationship established by early-modern scholarship, above all by the Bollandists, between hagiography, philology and archeology, and those constructed subsequently through historical and social sciences, together with art history and iconography, and also historical geography. The essays gathered in this volume also confirm how a European dimension for hagiographic studies has become indispensible.
Info: www.viella.it