The definition of a saint as a “sinner revised and edited” was coined by Ambrose Bierce for the deliciously irreverent The Devil’s Dictionary. However, the paradox of saints as sinners and sinners as saints was a terrifyingly real problem for holy men and women right from the end of Antiquity through the Middle Ages. This course will explore the difficulty of defining sainthood in text and image by considering a variety of themes around which sanctity was deemed to have crystallized: the body, landscape, dreams, visions and fragments, among others. We shall read some rollicking accounts of saints’
lives, look at a range of images depicting saints (including films), and think about how ideas of holiness were shaped, transmitted, “revised and edited” (in Bierce’s words), accepted, and rejected in an age that upheld sainthood as the ultimate ideal.