Nar. umjet. 45/1, 2008, pp. 21-41, N. Polgar, Joinville: A Hagiographic Story about Oneself… Original scientific paper Received: 18th Feb. 2008 Accepted: 8th March 2008 UDK 235.3:82.0-94"04/14" 21 NATAŠA POLGAR Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb JOINVILLE: A HAGIOGRAPHIC STORY ABOUT ONESELF AND ABOUT THE OTHER The article deals with a Mediaeval hagiographic text dating from 1309, Joinville's work Histoire de Saint Louis. The text is a hagiography or sacred biography, a legal testimony that served in the canonisation pro- cess of Louis IX, but, at the same time, also the chronicle of a crusader expedition, that is, the story of a journey which was both an expedition and a pilgrimage. Finally, the text is also an autobiography, since Join- ville also inserted elements from his own life in the discourse about the saint. The article elaborates the frameworks of hagiography in relation to historiography and the conception and formation of the Other (the non-Christian) in the context of the late Western Middle Ages. Keywords: the Middle Ages, hagiography, autobiography, the Other Hagiography as a literary genre Hagiography is a literary genre that was also called hagiology and hagiologic during the 17th century. As Hippolyte Delehaye noted in his Les légendes ha- giographiques as early as in 1905, hagiography favours the "performers" of the holy, that is, the saints, and aspires to exemplarity. According to Dele- haye, a hagiography is every written memorial inspired by the cult of a saint and serves in the furtherance of such saint (cf. according to de Certeau 1975:274). The notion of "hagiography" did not exist in the sense of literature in the Middle Ages, which is somewhat unusual if we recall which of the ar- tes were classified (artes amandi, dictaminis, dictandi, epistolariae, liberales, mechanicae, memorativae...). It was only at the end of the 17th century and/or beginning of the 18th that the notion of hagiography was given the meaning that it still has today: initially, the term was used to designate the one who wrote about the saints, that is, "the expert on saints", while it was used later to denote the literary genre that dealt with the saints and their lives. Diverse ele- ments – literary, archaeological, onomastic and iconographic – are brought to- brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk