In Search of Sacred Time: Jacques de Voragine and The Golden Legend by Jacques Le Goff (review)

It is only fitting that one of final books of the prolific French medievalist Jacques Le Goff, who died on 1 April 2014, is a study of one of the most famous and widely read literary works of the late Middle Ages. Originally published in French under the title A la recherche du temps sacré (2011), In Search of Sacred Time is, at its core, a critical examination of the The Golden Legend, a thirteenth-century compendium of saints’ lives by Jacobus de Voragine. Holding true to the tradition and methods of the Annales School to which he belonged, Le Goff approaches his subject from a socio-culture perspective. He argues that Jacobus’s masterwork was not intended to be read simply as a legendary or a devotional manual but rather as a “summa on time” (10, 18, 38, 67, 89, 92, 106, 112, 130, 147, 157, 164, 170, 171, 176, 181). The saints, whose lives populate its 178 chapters, are merely “markers of time,” while the “real subject” of the Legend is time itself as “willed by God and rendered sacred, or sanctified, by Christianity” (25, 38, 49, 57, 72, 87, 92, 139, 155, 163; xiii). Walking the reader through Jacobus’s carefully constructed vision of time, Le Goff draws attention to the relationship between the medieval perception of the passage of time and the conditions of its meaningful experience. In Search of Sacred Time thus offers more than just a discussion of the The Golden Legend; it provides a glimpse into the historical world of the late Middle Ages.

Jacobus de Voragine (b. ca.1228/9) was a Dominican friar based in the north of the Italian peninsula. In 1292, he became archbishop of Genoa. It is believed that he began writing the Legend around 1260, continuing to rework and revise the text until his death in 1298. As soon as it was published, the Legend became what is often referred to as a medieval “bestseller.” As Le Goff notes in the preface, there are over 1,000 extant manuscripts of the Legend today, a figure second only to the Bible (ix). By 1500, the Legend had been translated into many vernacular languages, including Italian, French, Dutch, English, High and Low German, and Czech. With the advent of printing, circulation increased even more. Le Goff suggests that the Legend owed its popularity, at least in part, to the growing practice of silent reading among the laity. As he explains, the Legend “benefited from exceptional historical circumstances” (x).

Thematically, Le Goff maintains that Jacobus’s Legend embraced the “encyclopedic spirit of his age” (147). Jacobus attempted to create not only a comprehensive summation (summa) of saints, but endowed his work with an underlying totality of narrative, reminiscent of a universal history in which Christ and Mary serve as unifying figures. Le Goff sees Jacobus as distinguishing between three dimensions of time: (1) the temporale, or the time marked by the liturgical calendar and its celebrations of the life of Christ, which is cyclical; (2) the sanctorale, or the time marked by the succession of the lives of saints, which is linear and historical; and (3) eschatological time, which in Christian belief represents the progress of time toward Judgment Day. Although Le Goff admits that the Legend does not prioritize eschatological time like many other theological treatises of the Middle Ages, he nevertheless argues for its primacy, explaining that for Jacobus, both the temporale and sanctorale were “in accord with eschatological time,” or as he writes, “drawn by God, with the thread of eschatological time” (86, 20). According to Le Goff, by presenting the three dimensions of time as interdependent, Jacobus reaffirms his central argument that “only Christianity has the means to structure and sacralize the time of human life in such as way as will lead humanity to salvation” (xiii).

The arrangement of Le Goff’s work and elegant prose...