A crusader, a hermit, a bishop, a plague victim, and even a
repentant murderer by turns: the stories attached to Saint Gerald
of Aurillac offer a strange and fragmented legacy. His two earliest
biographies, written in the early tenth and early eleventh
centuries, depicted the saint as a warrior who devoted his life to
pious service. Soon Gerald was a venerated figure, and the
monastery he founded was itself a popular pilgrimage site. Like
many other cults, his faded into obscurity over time, although a
small group of loyal worshippers periodically revived interest,
creating sculpted or stained glass images and the alternate
biographies that complicated an ever more obscure history."The
Making and Unmaking of a Saint" traces the rise and fall of
devotion to Gerald of Aurillac through a millennium, from his death
in the tenth century to the attempt to reinvigorate his cult in the
nineteenth century. Mathew Kuefler makes a strong case for the
sophistication of hagiography as a literary genre that can be used
to articulate religious doubts and anxieties even as it exalts the
saints; and he overturns the received attribution of Gerald's
detailed "Vita" to Odo of Cluny, identifying it instead as the work
of the infamous eleventh-century forger Ademar of Chabannes.
Through his careful examination, the biographies and iconographies
that mark the waxing and waning of Saint Gerald's cult tell an
illuminating tale not only of how saints are remembered but also of
how they are forgotten.
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