Scripture and Shape

Abstract

The culture of hagiography, that of the saints’ Lives, was deeply conservative, and there was little fundamental change in the way in which it represented dragons and their stories across the one and a half millennia in which it thrived. One consequence of this is that dragon’s physical evolution in the wider Christian world outside the Lives (as documented in Chapter 4) had relatively little impact on its representation within them, and for the most part the hagiographical dragon remains worm-style in form. The story-types in which the dragon is engaged in the Lives are strongly shaped by an agenda established by the representation of dragons, serpents, and sea-monsters in scripture, e.g. the Old Testament’s treatments of Leviathan, Rahab, the Serpent of Eden, Jonah’s fish, the Apocrypha’s treatment of the Dragon of Babylon, and the New Testament’s treatment of the Dragon of Revelation.