Hagiographical Sources Related to the Cult of Saints Medard and Gildard

Introduction. Four hagiographical texts about St. Medard of Soissons, two about Eleutherius of Tournai, and one each about Gildard of Rouen, Evodius of Rouen, Bandarid of Soissons, and Laud of Coutances have survived. All of them are connected with the cult of Sts. Medard and Gildard, who, in later tradition, came to be erroneously called brothers. Methods and materials. The study was carried out on the basis of critical, historicalgenetic and biographical methods. Analysis. The results of the critical analysis of the mentioned monuments allowed us to conclude that all of them differ in the time of their creation and the value of the information reflected in them, describing the life and activity of these holy bishops of the Merovingian era. Several texts were already created at the turn of the 6th – 7th centuries by the famous hagiographer Venantius Fortunatus. They can be important sources both for the reconstruction of the real biography of St. Medard and for the study of the history of the Merovingian period. The other texts were created later (in the Carolingian period and during the Classical Middle Ages), and the information about Medard and his time, added by their authors to the facts already known from Merovingian hagiography, does not represent historical value for the 6th century. Results. On the example of these monuments, it is possible to trace a characteristic change in the function of hagiography, when the Merovingian texts, compiled to glorify the cult of the saint, are replaced by hagiographies, the creation of which is connected with the confirmation of the land claims of the church in the 9th century, with the struggle around the united church of Noyon and Tournai, unfolding in the 11th – 12th centuries, as well as with the development of the myth about the kinship of Medard and Gildard, and so on. The mentioned phenomenon reflects some peculiarities of the appeal to the cults of Merovingian saints in different epochs, in particular the change of the purposes of creating their hagiographies in accordance with the requirements of the time.