Saints online

Amy Ogden is on a quest, searching for stories from the middle ages, sagas written in old French on parchment — some illuminated with gold, gorgeous manuscripts that would cost a herd of sheep to produce, others more utilitarian, rough volumes copied by individuals who were nearly illiterate but deeply devoted to God. Ogden is looking for Lives of saints.

Though she is culling the past, Ogden, an assistant professor of French, is using modern tools to expose this medieval literature to 21st-century seekers. Through fellowships with the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH), Ogden is cataloging not only the texts but also the variety and historical context of Lives of Christian saints written in French between the 9th and 16th centuries. The database she is creating will offer contemporary researchers a more complete understanding of these narratives, known collectively as hagiography.

“A lot of the Lives have never been edited,” Ogden explains. “If they have been edited, they haven’t been translated into a modern language — they’re in old French — so there’s a fairly small group of people who have access to them.”

Ogden hopes the nuance and diversity of the Lives revealed in her database will spark interest among scholars so these and other works — even works in other languages and other religious traditions — will be translated and made available to a wider audience.

“One of the reasons I was drawn to saints’ Lives was because they connect many different parts of medieval society,” Ogden explains.  “We tend to think of saints as being these pure, holy people who exist in this wonderfully clear relationship to God. That’s not what comes across in the Lives at all. They’re much more about human individuals who have very human problems.”

Saints’ Lives — with a capital ‘L’ to identify the narrative story of the character, as opposed to the historic or legendary experiences of the individual — were often copied by scribes as an act of devotion intended to keep the saint alive in the collective memory. While carried out with a somewhat different devotion, this project continues the effort to keep these saints alive in the modern age.

“What I’m interested in is the stories about the saints rather than the saints themselves,” Ogden says. “These Lives are mostly about saints from the first few centuries of Christianity — saints such as Lawrence, Margaret, Catherine of Alexandria, Alexis. But as you read these Lives, you realize how varied the different characters are and how human, but they’re also like superheroes.”

In addition to the database, Ogden expects to create a series of electronic editions. Different versions of, say, the life of St. Margaret, for example, will be posted along with images of ancient manuscripts that physically exist in widely divergent places such as Paris or Rome or Oxford. These will be positioned together on the Web page for a critical comparison that otherwise would be impossible.

IATH is a University research unit that supports the use of information technology as a tool for scholarly exploration in the humanities. Now in her second year of two IATH fellowships, Ogden credits much of the success of the project to the work she’s done with IATH associate directors Daniel Pitti and Worthy Martin.

“They give me tremendous help in terms of building the site and writing the html,” Ogden says. “Most importantly, though, it’s a really collaborative effort.”

Besides providing the technical expertise, Pitti and Martin have helped Ogden define the theoretical parameters of her scholarship and refine the way she presents her work on the Web page.

Her interest in these ancient stories has been part of Ogden’s scholarly journey since graduate school. But opening the door to obscure French manuscripts, to make them easier for researchers and scholars to access, translate and teach, is not her only objective.

“There’s a vast interest in saints right now,” Ogden asserts, citing the shelves of volumes in Barnes & Noble related to the stories and iconography of religious figures and efforts to canonize Pope John Paul II. Making the content of these ancient texts readily available on the Internet will make it easier for contemporary non-scholarly seekers to enjoy the stories as well. “This beautiful art and the sensitivity and the value of friendship and family relations is something that connects us all.”