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Updated: May 25, 2025
Who in our time can express the melancholy essence, the pale perfume of the ancient translations of the Golden Legend of Voragine, how bind in one bright posy the plaintive flowers, which the monks cultivated in their cloistered enclosures, when hagiography was the sister of the barbaric and delightful art of the illuminators and glass stainers, of the ardent and chaste paintings of the Early Masters?
It is enough to say, that they were of very easy belief; and hence men began to write their histories in the style of romance, mixing up a thousand fables with the deeds of great men, such as Roland, nephew to Charlemagne; which so suited the taste of the age, that no book would afterwards go down in any other style witness, for instance, the Manual of Devotions by James de Voragine, archbishop of Genoa, composed towards the latter end of the thirteenth century; and in which Melchior Canus, a learned Spanish bishop, is so scandalized in his eleventh book of Common Places.
But such rationalism was beyond the grasp of an ignorant age, and collections of stories of miracles, such as remain to us in the "Golden Legends" of Jacob de Voragine, a Dominican of the thirteenth century, fed the popular belief.
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