hagiography

Noun

hagiography (countable and uncountable, plural hagiographies)

1. (uncountable) The study of saints and the documentation of their lives.
   • The second half of the eleventh century saw a notable surge of interest in hagiography throughout England, which meant that many of the Anglo-Saxon saints of earlier eras were furnished, often for the first time, with a Latin Vita.2004, Rosalind C. Love, Goscelin of Saint-Bertin: The Hagiography of the Female Saints of Ely, →ISBN
   • Jacques LeGoff remarks, 'Hagiography tells us much about the mental infrastructure [of the middle ages]: the interpenetration between the tangible world and the supernatural world, the common nature of the corporeal and psychic, are the conditions which make miracles and related phenomena possible.2005, Thomas Head, Hagiography and the Cult of Saints: The Diocese of Orléans, 800-1200, →ISBN
2. (countable) A biography of a saint.
3. (broadly, countable) A biography which expresses reverence and respect for its subject.
   • Churchill revisionism, of course, is almost as much of a cottage industry as Churchill hagiography.2021 October 26, Peter Baker, “The Case Against Winston Churchill”, in The New York Times, →ISSN
4. (derogatory) A biography which is uncritically supportive of its subject, often including embellishments or propaganda.
   • For an obsequious hagiography of [William] Byrd, see L. Wright 1940. For a more critical assessment, see Lockridge 1987, 1992.2006, Matt Wray, Not Quite White, page 151
   • This 'cultivated characteriology' (ibid., p. 117) is one that she suggests has been reduced to the cult of the theorist's personality in many of the hagiographies written about Foucault, missing how he cultivated his ethos or characteriology in order to persuade, seduce, unsettle, question, and so...2016, Britta Timm Knudsen, Carsten Stage, Affective Methodologies, page 29