Many Lives of One Man. Strategies for Building Legitimacy through the Story of St Wenceslas in Early and High Medieval Hagiography (940s–1260s)
| Title in English | Many Lives of One Man Strategies for Building Legitimacy through the Story of St Wenceslas in Early and High Medieval Hagiography (940s–1260s) |
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
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| Description | St. Wenceslas (921-935) and the transformation of his image in medieval hagiography and historiography is thanks to the high number and density of existing texts an excellent field for research on the analysis of the competing claims. The following analysis will be based primarily on St.-Wenceslas hagiography. Therefore, it will be important to introduce the existing dossier of the texts. The large group of hagiographic texts was written among other things to support the claims of particular groups of people. Although those claims must not have been explicitly expressed in the texts, they, at least, introduce us to the contemporary discourse (“Gedankenwelt”) and help us to understand the contemporary “sociology”. Comparison of the preserved texts will help us to sort out common elements and reveal contemporary discourse on one side, on the other side, it promises to recognizing specifics of each of the texts, which will bring us closer to the particular authorial intention of each of the hagiographers and their specific strategies of building legitimacy for particular claims. Finally, the results based on the analysis of the texts and their comparison will be questioned from the perspective of the intended and real audience – here, our main source of information will be the manuscript transmission of the texts. |
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