Value To Students of Medieval Culture
Written in simple, readable Latin, the book was read in its day for its stories. Each of these is well told, but in mass they tend to become monotonous and blur together, with their repetitious accounts of martyrdoms and miracles. The book is considered the closest to an encyclopaedia of medieval saint lore that survives today; as such it is invaluable to art historians and medievalists who seek to identify saints depicted in art by their deeds and attributes. Its repetitious nature is explained if Jacobus de Voragine meant to write a compendium of saintly lore for sermons and preaching, not a work of popular entertainment.
The critical edition of the Latin text has been edited by Giovanni Paolo Maggioni (Florence: SISMEL 1998).
A modern English translation of the Golden Legend has been published by William Granger Ryan, ISBN 0-691-00153-7 and ISBN 0-691-00154-5 (2 volumes).
A modern translation of the Golden Legend is available from Fordham University's Medieval Sourcebook.
Read more about this topic: Golden Legend
Famous quotes containing the words students, medieval and/or culture:
“We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation-rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)
“The medieval university looked backwards; it professed to be a storehouse of old knowledge.... The modern university looks forward, and is a factory of new knowledge.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (18251895)
“When women finally get liberated, theyll do the same that men dodog eat dog thats what our culture is.... Not cooperation but assassination. Women will cooperate until they attain certain goals. Then one will begin to destroy the other.”
—Alice Neel (19001984)