Hagiography Unbound: A Theory of Making and Using Holy Media

Hagiography is a scholarly category that has been used primarily to group textual sources that represent the lives of Christian saints. This article contends that the utility of hagiography and hagiographical far exceeds this commonplace usage, in terms of both the ways they entail broadly enacted c...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of the American Academy of Religion
Main Author: Hollander, Aaron T. (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Oxford University Press [2021]
In: Journal of the American Academy of Religion
Year: 2021, Volume: 89, Issue: 1, Pages: 72-102
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Summary:Hagiography is a scholarly category that has been used primarily to group textual sources that represent the lives of Christian saints. This article contends that the utility of hagiography and hagiographical far exceeds this commonplace usage, in terms of both the ways they entail broadly enacted cultural dynamics and their applicability beyond conventional disciplinary expectations of what constitutes representations of saints (or even religious content). The article provides a retheorization along two analytic vectors: (1) framing hagiography in terms of a field of many interconnected media rather than identifying it with texts alone, and (2) studying it in terms of the psychosocial processes (imagination, representation, and appropriation) that generate and mobilize understandings of holiness in the world rather than limiting it to the products that instantiate but do not exhaust these processes.
ISSN:1477-4585
Contains:Enthalten in: American Academy of Religion, Journal of the American Academy of Religion
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1093/jaarel/lfab009