A hagiography is a type of biography that tells the life story of a saint, religious leader, or important figure in a religion. The word comes from the Greek words "hágios," meaning "holy," and "graphía," meaning "writing." These writings often describe the person's good deeds, miracles, or how they suffered for their beliefs, especially if they were a martyr. Some hagiographies include all of these details together.

In Christianity, hagiographies focus on the lives of people who have been officially recognized as holy by groups like the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, and others. Similar writings also exist in other religions, such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Sikhism, where they describe the lives of spiritual leaders or holy people.

Today, the word "hagiography" is sometimes used in a negative way to describe biographies or histories that are seen as too positive or not fair because they praise their subject too much.

Many hagiographies from the Middle Ages also include information about the history of places, religious traditions, and the customs of people who followed these holy figures.

Christianity

Hagiography was an important type of writing in the early Christian church. It included both real historical events and inspiring stories and legends. A hagiographic account of a saint could include a biography (vita), a description of the saint's deeds or miracles, an account of the saint's martyrdom (passio), or a mix of these elements.

The tradition of writing about saints' lives began in the Roman Empire when stories about Christian martyrs were recorded. The dates when these martyrs died were used to create martyrologies. In the 4th century, there were three main types of catalogs of saints' lives:

• Annual calendar catalog, or menaion (from Greek, meaning "monthly"), which included biographies of saints to be read during sermons;
• Synaxarion (from Greek, meaning "collection"), a shorter version of saints' lives arranged by dates;
• Paterikon (from Greek, meaning "of the Fathers"), which focused on the lives of specific saints chosen by the catalog writer.

The earliest saints' lives focused on desert fathers who lived as ascetics starting in the 4th century. The life of Anthony of Egypt is usually considered the first example of this new type of Christian biography.

In Western Europe, hagiography was an important way to share inspiring stories during the Middle Ages. The Golden Legend, written by Jacobus de Voragine, collected many medieval hagiographic stories, especially those about miracles. Saints' lives were often written to promote local or national religious traditions and to encourage pilgrimages to visit relics. The bronze Gniezno Doors in Poland's Gniezno Cathedral are the only Romanesque doors in Europe to show the life of a saint. The life of Saint Adalbert of Prague, who is buried in the cathedral, is shown in 18 scenes, likely based on a lost illuminated copy of one of his lives.

The Bollandist Society continues to study, organize, evaluate, and publish materials about the lives of Christian saints (see Acta Sanctorum).

Many important hagiographic texts in medieval England were written in the Anglo-Norman dialect. With the introduction of Latin literature into England in the 7th and 8th centuries, writing about saints became more popular. Compared to heroic poems like Beowulf, saints' lives share some similarities. In Beowulf, the hero battles monsters like Grendel and his mother, while saints like Anthony or Guthlac battle spiritual enemies. Both stories focus on a hero-warrior, but the saint's battles are spiritual.

Imitating the life of Jesus was the standard for measuring saints, and imitating saints' lives was how people measured themselves. In Anglo-Saxon and medieval England, hagiography became a key way to teach people who could not read. It gave priests and theologians tools to share their faith using the examples of saints' lives.

Among English hagiographers, Abbot Ælfric of Eynsham was the most productive and aware of the importance of the genre. His work, Lives of the Saints, includes sermons for saints' days once celebrated by the English Church. The text has two prefaces, one in Latin and one in Old English, and 39 lives starting on December 25 with the birth of Christ and ending with three texts not tied to specific saints' days. The text covers the entire year and describes the lives of many saints, both English and from other regions, and references some of the earliest saints from the early church.

There are two known examples of saints' lives being adapted into plays in Britain. These are the Cornish-language works Beunans Meriasek and Beunans Ke, which tell the lives of Saints Meriasek and Kea.

Other examples of hagiographies from England include:

• The Chronicle by Hugh Candidus
• The Secgan Manuscript
• The list of John Leyland
• Possibly the book Life by Saint Cadog
• Vita Sancti Ricardi Episcopi et Confessoris Cycestrensis / Life of Richard of Chichester by Ralph Bocking
• The Book of Margery Kempe, which is an example of autohagiography, where the subject writes her own life using the hagiographic style.

Ireland is known for its rich tradition of hagiography and the large amount of material produced during the Middle Ages. Irish writers mostly wrote in Latin, though some later saint's lives were written in the Irish language. Notable examples include the lives of St. Patrick, St. Columba (Latin)/Colum Cille (Irish), and St. Brigit/Brigid—Ireland's three patron saints. The earliest surviving life was written by Cogitosus. Several Irish calendars, which listed feast days of Christian saints (sometimes called martyrologies or feastologies), included short summaries of saints' lives gathered from many sources. Examples include the Martyrology of Tallaght and the Félire Óengusso. These calendars helped create lists of native Irish saints, modeled after calendars from other regions.

In the 10th century, a Byzantine monk named Simeon Metaphrastes changed the genre of saints' lives, making it more moral and celebratory. His catalog of saints' lives became the standard for Western and Eastern hagiographers, who began to create idealized versions of saints by moving away from real facts. Over time, the genre included stories from before Christianity, like tales about fighting dragons, medieval parables, and short stories.

The tradition of writing about saints' lives spread to the Slavic world in the Bulgarian Empire during the late 9th and early 10th centuries. The first original hagiographies there were about Cyril and Methodius, Clement of Ohrid, and Naum of Preslav. The Bulgarians later brought this tradition to Kievan Rus, along with writing and translations from Greek. In the 11th century, they began writing the lives of their own early saints, such as Boris and Gleb and Theodosius Pechersky. In the 16th century, Metropolitan Macarius expanded the list of Russian saints and oversaw the creation of their life stories. These stories were compiled into the Velikiye chet'yi-minei catalog (Great Menaion Reader), a 12-volume work organized by the months of the year. St. Dimitry of Rostov revised and expanded the catalog between 1684 and 1705.

The Life of Alexander Nevsky was a notable hagiographic work from this era.

Today, the works in the genre of

Judaism

Jewish writings about holy people began in the Middle Ages and continued afterward. These writings tell stories about miracles performed by rabbis and important figures from earlier times, such as those in the Talmud or the Bible. These stories became more common in Kabbalistic writings and later in the Hasidic movement.

Islam

Hagiography in Islam started in the Arabic language during the 8th century CE with biographical writing about the Prophet Muhammad, a tradition called sīra. In the 10th century CE, another type of writing called manāqib developed. This included biographies of the imams who created different schools of Islamic thought and of Sufi saints. Over time, stories about Sufi saints and their miracles became the main focus of manāqib.

Inspired by early Islamic studies of hadiths and other information about the Prophet, Persian scholars began writing hagiography in Persian around the 11th century CE. These writings mostly focused on Sufi saints.

The spread of Islam into Turkish regions led to the creation of Turkish biographies of saints, starting in the 13th century CE and growing more common by the 16th century. This practice continued to develop alongside historical writing until 1925, when Mustafa Kemal Atatürk banned Sufi brotherhoods. After Turkey eased legal limits on Islamic practices in the 1950s and 1980s, Sufis again began writing hagiography, a trend that continues today.

Other groups

The Church of Scientology created a biography of L. Ron Hubbard that is not entirely true and contains many fictional elements. It is often described as a very positive biography.