Beyond Positivism and Genre: “Hagiographical" Texts as Historical Narrative

"Beyond Positivism and Genre: 'Hagiographical' Texts as Historical Narrative." This essay argues that attempts to identify criteria by which to distinguish a genre of "hagiography" from "historiography" are bound to fail because there can be no single definition of "hagiography" or of "historiography" that is universally valid. Historical narrative, in particular, must be understood in relation to the political context in which it is produced. The essay considers the problem of the "genre of hagiography" by taking into account the major changes in conceptions of historiography and in political structures which took place in the twelfth century and again in the nineteenth century. It concludes that the concept of "hagiography" is an ideological tool generated in the nineteenth century to serve nineteenth-century purposes; the concept of "hagiography" had no function in earlier centuries, and therefore did not exist. It argues in particular that the ideological construction "hagiography" should not be utilized in analyses of ninth-, tenth-, and eleventh-century Francia.