1 - The Gift, Sacrifice and Social Economy

Summary

The gift is one of the most pervasive and conceptually important motifs in Old French hagiography. Saints' lives depict their protagonists as both recipients of gifts from God and model donors in their own right, as exemplary individuals given over to the service of a higher authority and as powerful benefactors communicating divine gifts to a wider Christian community. Saints are frequently implicated in networks of relationships in which the gift is at once a form of sacrifice and an idiom of social and spiritual interaction between God, the saint and a human community of believers. In giving to God, the saint both acknowledges his or her indebtedness to a divine patron and claims that debt as part of a relationship of ongoing exchange. This relationship makes the saint both a donor and a recipient of the gift. In turn, by praying to the saint, the Christian community attempts to harness the saint's powers of donation for itself, making the saint an intermediary in the transmission of gifts between god and his christian subjects.

In this chapter, I would like to focus on how the gift operates in a range of texts dramatizing the lives of confessor saints as well as those of Christian martyrs. While taking into account the differences in the portrayal of the gift in these two branches of hagiographic literature, I will argue that there is an underlying logic to the gift in hagiography that informs its various uses.