Random Number Lit

  A call the section on the Big Book List that are full of Anonymous authored texts largely derived from the Penguin classics list - the Anonymous Forest! Other pulls from that second on the list, Njal’s Saga (before I started doing the newsletter).   Going into this text, I have read The Life of Anthony in seminary so I counted that text completed here, and so I had some texts from Jerome to read and a few others. These writings were leaps and bounds more interesting to read than Voragine, sorry for the hate old guy - but Jerome is a much better writer. I will keep this section short as well, I enjoyed reading these biographies rather than hagiographies. The story of Anthony’s coat comes back in Jerome account of the life of Paul of Thebes. Apparently, Anthony thought that he was the first hermit, but someone tells Anthony of Paul of Thebes, so Anthony (in Paul’s story) sets off to find him.  A Centaur in the desert gives Anthony directions. Anthony finds Paul of Thebes

  JACOBUS VORAGINE - Golden Legend From the Big Book List, I drew Jacobus Voragine’s Golden Legend which is the 13th century French collection of the hagiography of the early church. I have to be transparent here and say that I have study Christian theology in a mainline Protestant seminary, and I was wholly unaware of much of the work in this text. Hagiography – noun – the writing of the lives of saints. Here is what is weird about the word hagiography. It seems in modern parlance it means something that is obviously false and fantastic but sort of benign and whimsical in a way that is nonthreatening. I could be wrong here, but my first experience with hagiography was in my undergraduate days when I came across the story of the life of Brandon which is a magical tale of the first Europeans to make landfall on the North American continent. Brandon’s life is not recorded here in the Golden Legend version from Penguin I read for reasons I don’t understand. It is not in the e