DEVOTION AND DISBELIEF IN THE OLD FRENCH VIE DE SAINT ANTOINE: HAGIOGRAPHICAL DOUBT AND THE LITERARY TRADITION OF SAINT ANTHONY THE GREAT

[...]a similar task was undertaken less than one hundred years later by Pierre de Lanoy with his French-language Légende du Grand Saint Antoine2 Here, the author, who, as Laura Fenelli points out, very likely knew and was emulating the Codex Antonii,21 similarly presents material taken from a selection of literary depictions of the story of St Anthony in order to bring them together under the sovereignty of the original Vita? Since its rediscovery in 1939, this text has not been treated as a lost piece of Anthony's life story nor has it been reabsorbed into the contemporary body of Catholic devotional literature.73 Rather, it is treated as the artefact of an obsolete form of saintly representation whose historiographical and devotional implications no longer have factual bearing on modern understandings of the 'real' Anthony.74 In this sense, the Vie de Saint Antoine is, in its independent approach to hagiographical authorship, emblematic of one of the major characteristics which has excluded it from both religious and secular historical discourse in the present day. [...]among the important trends which emerge from Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Thelma Fenster, and Delbert Russell's recent edition of Anglo-Norman literature is the remarkable regularity with which medieval hagiographers create difference with respect to their sources specifically in order to encourage readers to favour their own renditions of a given saint's story to the detriment of its competitors. [...]although all three versions translate the same original, the champenois version highlights the relationship between Athanasius and Anthony whereas Wauchier and the anonymous translator of BnF MS fr. 23112 edit out this detail in order to emphasize the narration of Anthony's spiritual as opposed to material legacy.