On born-to-be-saints, John Kitchen, in Saints' Lives and
the Rhetoric of Gender (Oxford UP, 1998) - a book with which I
have some serious quarrels - does a very nice job of contrasting
Venantius Fortunatus's portrayal of born-to-be saints with Gregory of
Tours's portrayals of saints-despite-themselves, cranky and rude
characters, rough around the edges, who nonetheless achieve
sanctity. There are many hagiographies in which the saint
exhibits saintly qualities from an early age (Boniface, for example,
began to consider the advantages of the monastic life at the age of
four), I can't recall any that involve prophecies or omens, though I
suspect others on the list will know of them.
The great literary templates for persons predicted to be holy
even before their birth are the stories of the nativities of John the
Baptist and of Jesus himself in the Gospel of Luke, and the story of
Christ's nativity in the Gospel of Matthew. The influence of
these texts upon hagiographic composition is not to be
underestimated. Extracanonical texts, too, exercise their
influence. The Protoevangelium of James, for example,
contains horrific stories of Jesus as a small boy exercising his
divine power in some fairly vengeful ways. Was this text
current in Ireland?
In a funny way, the motifs of saint-by-predestination and
saint-by-conversion, which are often in tension with one another in
medieval hagiography, are combined in the story of Jesus, who
is predicted to be great and holy before his birth, yet goes
through a conversion of sorts during his baptism. A similar
juxtaposition can be found in the Vita Martini; even
though Martin was a pagan soldier who converted to Christianity and
had a particular and famous epiphany, his biographer assures us that
his moral qualities were present since birth, and particularly that
as a soldier he avoided the usual vices of soldiers.
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Patrick J. Nugent
Earlham College
Richmond, Indiana 47374 USA
(765) 983-1413
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