The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints [Paperback]

Depicting the lives of the saints in an array of factual and fictional stories,The Golden Legendwas perhaps the most widely read book, after the Bible, during the late Middle Ages. It was compiled around 1260 by Jacobus de Voragine, a scholarly friar and later archbishop of Genoa, whose purpose was to captivate, encourage, and edify the faithful, while preserving a vast store of information pertaining to the legends and traditions of the church. In this translation, the first in English of the complete text, William Granger Ryan captures the immediacy of this rich work, which offers an important guide for readers interested in medieval art and literature and, more generally, in popular religious culture.

Arranged according to the order of saints' feast days, these fascinating stories are now combined into one volume. This edition also features an introduction by Eamon Duffy contextualizing the work.

William Granger Ryanwas a priest in the diocese of Brooklyn and Queens and president of Seton Hill College.Eamon Duffyis professor of the history of Christianity at Cambridge University. His books includeThe Stripping of the AltarsandSaints and Sinners. [The Golden Legend] came to serve as the literary equivalent of wall-paintings and stained glass. . . . For the translation of the work in its entirety into English we have had to wait 700 years for the energy and learning of a distinguished American academic, William Granger Ryan. ---Gerard Irvine,Times Literary Supplement Art historians depend on it. Medievalists should know it inside-out. . . . [F]or the rest of us it remains a treasure-house of European culture, crammed full of the things which everyone, once upon a time, used to know. ---Noel Malcolm,Sunday Telegraph Princeton University Press's volume must rank as one of the most useful reprints of the year for church historians, art historians, and students of medieval and early mlĂB