Any study of hagiography must start with more or less the same question: what were people who wrote stories about saints trying to achieve? If one looks at samples from across early medieval Europe, one could be struck both by how creative hagiographers could be, and how conservative they could be with their themes and motifs. One might note with surprise that writers from Ireland to Rome wrote about similar ideas of purity and sin using similar textual role models, such as St. Martin of Tours, the fourth- century soldier-turnedhermit- turned-bishop, or St. Benedict of Nursia, the sixthcentury abbot and founder of monasteries; and just as often one might note the significant differences in worldview and context suggested by the same texts. All hagiographers started, in some sense, by wanting to do something with the story of a particular saintly hero— to celebrate their achievements, obviously, but maybe also to make particular moral, theological, or political points. We start, therefore, by exploring some of the different factors that shaped the process of producing hagiography. To do so takes us to the heart of how individuals and communities described their world in text.

A useful and amusing example is provided by the eighthcentury failed saint Aldebert of Soisson (cited in the Letters of Boniface, no. 59). Aldebert knew all about how to make a saint. People dedicated churches to saints and distributed their relics. They told stories about their heroic piety, drawn from books. In life, saints were usually marked by a piety which challenged the norms of the time, and there were signs that proved their sanctity. Understanding the game, Aldebert set about establishing himself as a real, living saint. He encouraged people to set up oratories near their fields; he told them they did not need to confess their sins to obtain salvation; he told them they did not need to travel to Rome on pilgrimage— all things which made salvation more accessible to ordinary people than they were through the institutional Church. He distributed his own hair and fingernails as sacred objects. And, perhaps most importantly of all, he wrote his own saintly biography, the Life of Aldebert, which started with a vision his mother had had during pregnancy foretelling his sanctity. Aldebert tried to make himself into a saint and knew what he was doing.