At cocktail parties when people ask me what I do, I usually just say that I'm a professor (inserting employed or unemployed depending on my current status). When pressed for my field, my answer "hagiography" elicits one of two responses.

The first consists of your generic blank stare, sometimes punctuated by a polite "Oh?" The second (offered up by those who've either had too much to drink or who have no better place to be) is "Huh? Never heard of it." Attend to this column, dear reader, and you will soon have the means of surprising the socks off the next hagiographer you meet at a cocktail party. You will not only be able to make saintly small talk over a martini, you may make your new acquaintance inhale an olive by responding with an insightful question about St. Radegunde.

A Little Terminology

Hagiography is the writing of stories (or legenda) on the saints. Since I do not write the stories of the saints, I'm not a hagiographer. I merely work on hagiographic texts. My friends at Advent, however, thought I'd be better able to compete with those TV astrologers if they called me "Hagiographer to the Stars." My area is the saints and not marketing, so I cannot quibble with them. I only hope that this web-column doesn't come to the attention of the folks at the Hagiography Society.

Hagio- in Greek performs much the same function as sanct- in Latin. Hence, the Greek word hagios can mean both ‘holy' and ‘saint,' just as sanctus does in Latin. If you've absolutely never heard the word hagios before, you are simply not ecumenical enough. Go to a Greek food festival and make some friends. Expand your horizons.

More Terminology than You Ever Wanted

Vita, which means ‘life' in Latin, rather obviously denotes the story of a saint's life. (In the name of pedantry, the plural is vitae.) A passio or ‘passion' (plural passiones) records the account of a saint's martyrdom. This is all quite logical as passio derives from the verb patior meaning ‘to suffer'. To call a saint's story a legendum, or legend, does not that you're relinquishing the saint to the world of myth and make-believe. Admittedly, however, a number of legenda -- like the one of St. Margaret and the dragon --do belong to the fantastical world of pixies and compassionate conservatism.

Incidently, the original word for saint in English was not ‘saint.' We can thank the execrable Normans for that little Latin descendent. The word used by the Anglo-Saxons to identify a saint was halga (the plural was halgan). We get our modern word 'holy' from the Old English word halig, and there are a few other remnants of the original Old English: ‘hallowed,' for example, and ‘Hallowe'en' or ‘All Hallows' Eve' (i.e. the eve of all saints). The superfluity of Latin descendants, like ‘sanctity,' ‘sanctification,' ‘sanctimonious,' and ‘sanctiloquent' (there's a word that doesn't get used nearly enough) show how very prolific sanct- has been in our language. The native Germanic tongue lost that battle.

So, this gives you a very brief introduction into the world of hagiography. Feel free to send any queries on the saints to me. Response time will vary, but I will respond. Let me just offer the following disclaimer: I reserve the right to be flippant or ironic, to bluff and mock shamelessly. The wonderful folks at the Church of the Advent are in no way responsible for my blather be it accurate or erroneous.