Fictional saints and fictions about saints: cults of saints between ecclesiastic control and tradition

The study is dedicated to Christian saints whose historicity is not confirmed or is questioned, and is intended to determine the sources of medieval narratives about fictitious saints and to characterize the significance of the corresponding texts in the context of scholarly research of medieval history and culture. The article is based on the modern investigations in the field of medieval history and on the primary sources such as lives of saints and their collections, liturgical texts, and other narrative works. Historical-genetic, comparative-historical, systemic-historical, diachronic, hermeneutic and other methods are applied. As one of the most striking examples of the analyzed phenomenon, legends about St. George are considered; the circumstances of the origin of his cult are investigated; the characteristic features of early narratives dedicated to him are revealed. The pdrocess of gradual rationalization and historicization of the corresponding narratives is reflected. The inconsistency of the original versions of the life of St. George is emphasized; various options for the localization of his birth, exploits and death are given. The impossibility of establishing a plausible outline of his life and martyrdom is stated. Attempts to identify the martyr with real historical figures of the Late Antiquity period are characterized, and the degree of success of these attempts is assessed. The author concludes that despite the lack of completely reliable evidence of the historicity of George, he became a metahistorical character, a hero of literature and folklore, an iconic image of a defender and an example of religious fortitude. Examples of fictions about saints, characteristic of the classical Middle Ages, are analyzed; examples of the creation of legendary stories about the life and miracles of the inhabitants of popular cult places are studied. The formation of a legend about a saint and the corresponding tradition of veneration is understood as a rather slow (often centuries-old) expansion of the corresponding narrative. The mechanism of this process is revealed, the basis of which was the gradual emergence of a “reliable” biography of a fictional saint, containing a name, family history, details of life and death. It was established that the sources of the studied narratives were the Gospels, the writings of the Church Fathers and previous stories about saints. These narratives reflect the aspirations and needs of the people of the Middle Ages and their communities by recording a special layer of historical reality that requires a close study.