Hello and welcome to Literature and History, episode 93, Severus's Life of Saint Martin.

In this program we will read one of the most famous of all the many Christian hagiographies

or saints lives.

Solpicius Severus's Life of Saint Martin put into circulation in the late 390s is one of

the earlier works of Christian biography to have come down to us from antiquity.

Its central figure is Martin of tour, a gallic bishop who lived from roughly 336 until

397, famous for his military background, his generosity, his abstemiousness, his small

role in an ecclesiastical crisis in the mid-380s and like so many Catholic saints, the

many miracles he has said to have performed.

This is the third of three episodes covering some of the earliest Christian biographies.

We began with the Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, a prison diary of a Roman Christian

noblewoman executed in an amphitheater in 202 or 203.

And in the previous episode we studied four aromatic saints lives, biographies of Christian

desert hermits active between about 250 and 370, focusing mainly on St. Anthony the Great,

but also Paul of Thebes, Hilarion of Palestine and Malkus of Syria.

In our third and final program on early Christian biography, we'll move into the decades of

the 380s and 390s, decades when for the first time in history, bishops and popes, newly

secure after the edict of Thessalonica in 380, were learning how to navigate relationships

with Roman emperors.

The early Christian biographies covered in this sequence of episodes are from a period

of Christianity in transition.

At the beginning of the third century, when Perpetua and Felicity were executed in modern

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