The Thesaurus der Heiligen is part of the “Geschichtsquellen des deutschen Mittelalters“, which provides central information on medieval sources from the German territory. Thus, its focus lies on German saints and lists 296 entries. The entries include information on the opus in which the respective saint is mentioned and – if the author is known – on the author of these opuses. The site provides a useful overview of the handwritten tradition of the works and does also provide links to digitised manuscripts (if available), information on editions, translations and studies of author and/or opus.
Archiv der Kategorie: Dictionaries
Dictionary of Catholic Theology
A French website concerning saints linking to digitised editions and entries of the „Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique“ (grouped by type: doctors of the church, church fathers, mystics, century).
Franciscan Authors (13th -18th century)
A continually growing catalogue listing Franciscan authors who lived between the 13th and 18th century. In addition to biographical information on the life and work of the respective authors, the entries comprise information on manuscripts and editions of the author’s works as well as literature on the author and/or their works. The site is structured rather conveniently: you will be able to either research a particular author by the help of an alphabetical list or to browse via the categories “Vitae Miracula” and “Order Provinces”. Moreover, the authors of the website, namely Bert Roest and Maarten van der Heijden, also provide a small compilation of virtual publications and bibliographies on medieval and Franciscan preaching, medieval exegesis, Franciscan historiography and Franciscan travel and missionary works, all of which were last updated between 2017 and 2019. Additionally, the site lists a wide range of handy research resources, which are arranged bibliographically and can therefore be easily accessed for your own advanced research.
Make sure that you use the current website as the old version is still online, but is no longer updated.
Mapping Miracles
The project Mapping Miracles. A Database of Motifs in Insular Hagiography was initially started by students and aims to develop a taxonomy and online repository of miracles in saints’ lives written in Latin and the regional vernaculars in Britain and Ireland between 600 and 1200. They are aiming at developing a useful resource for researchers. However, Mapping Miracles is still in its first phase as they are currently cataloging conversion motifs and coming up with an overall data structure. Also, the last post was published in 2014 and the last symposium was in 2015.
Last Updated: 2015
Centro Studi San Giovanni da Capestrano
This is the website of the Italian research centre for John of Capistrano. It mainly provides information on the life and work of John of Capistrano but also about past events and the research centre itself. Additionally, there are also some links to websites related to the subject.The website is in Italian.
Last Updated: 2020
CatholicSaints.Info
A site that collects information on “15,771 saints, beati, venerables and feasts“ and provides a vast amount of information for hagiographic research. Among the key benefits of this site is the extensive amount of search options: your research is not limited to the name or feast day of a saint but there are plenty of other options available: you will be able to browse the site via categories such as occupation, life status, gender, type of death, characteristics of the respective saint (e.g. disability) and the pope who beatified or canonised a saint. Additionally, there are several lists of saints (organised by alphabet, patronage groups, calendar etc.). The length and the content of the entries vary, although there are similarities in the structure of the entries (memorial, profile, born, died, canonation, representation and additional information such as books and other internet sources). However, it must be mentioned that the project is the work – in his own words – of an amateur hagiographer: the site does not provide access to its sources and while the site features a great collection of downloadable ebooks, the scientific value of these books has to be examined before using them for academic research – the same goes for the entries of the main site.
Nevertheless, the value of this site lies in the extensive amount of its entries and the very useful research categories. This way, the site is able to accommodate researchers with different interests.
Associazione Italiana San Rocco Di Montpellier
On this site, the Italian Association Saint Roch of Montpellier and the International Centre for Studies on Saint Roch compile information related to Saint Roch both in Roman languages and in English. The section „AGIOGRAFIE“ provides a list of biographical material on the saint from different authors oof the 15th century. Furthermore, the site gives access to transcriptions of its listed sources. While those transcriptions follow the language of the original text, the basic information about the sources themselves are given in some Roman languages and in English.
Last Updated: 2021
Sources Chrétiennes
This site, which is connected to the Institut des Sources Chrétiennes, offers a database which is useful to find specific contributions from the Sources Chrétiennes. In the section of “Auteur anciens” and the following “Accès par pôle”, you will find the section “Hagiographie (monde grec)”, which lists a few hagiographers. There is only little biographical information but there are references to their works and positions in the PG. Moreover, the website provides a list of their published works. In general, the site also gives content descriptions of the editions published in the Sources Chrétiennes. The entire website is in French.
Last Updated: 2019
Narrative Sources: The Narrative Sources from the Medieval Low Countries
Narrative Sources from the Medieval Low Countries is an annotated collection of narrative source texts of all kinds which originate in the historical area of the medieval Low Countries. This includes historiographical sources as well as hagiographical texts. The entries contain a great deal of information on the genesis of the text (author, period of origin, etc.), on transmission (manuscripts, co-transmission, etc.) but also on modern accessibility (editions, translations, etc.). All of this information can be searched for explicitly. In general, the search options are manifold: in addition to a temporal limitation you can also search directly for manuscripts or certain types of sources. This is where hagiography comes into play. Hagiography can be selected via the „Type“ search function. A total of 786 entries on hagiographical texts from the Low Countries between the 6th and 16th centuries can be found here.
Author: Jeroen Deploige (Department of History – Ghent University)
Saints and Geography
The ongoing project Saints and Geography is concerned with the veneration of saints and provides an interactive database and spreadsheets. For now, the data is limited to the northern diocese of Iceland (Hólar) but they aim at also providing data for Skálholt as well as Bath and Wells. The goal is that users will be able to examine the distribution of veneration of the individual saints (church dedications, statues, literature, pilgrimages, miracles) against the background of a satellite map which provides information about the geographical context (you will need a Google Earth Plugin). The database offers the search option “search saints & categories” but you can also search for specific churches, monasteries etc. The search entries provide the source date, the geographical location, and the respective manuscript (if applicable). The website is currently not accessible.
Author: Margaret Cormack