L’anonimato nell’agiografia mediolatina

Four types of anonymity can be distinguished in Middle Latin hagiographical texts. We can speak of “absolute” (intratextual) anonymity when the author’s name is voluntarily omitted in every part of the text. “Induced” (paratextual), when the name falls out accidentally, due to the loss of the intitulatio or another part of the text in which it was present. “Declared”, when it is intended by the author himself, who asks to remain anonymous out of humility (e.g. Sulpicius Severus in the Vita Martini). “Apparent”, when the author’s name is hidden inside an acrostic or other rhetorical device. The absence of the author’s name can make a text suspect of heresy, as happened to numerous texts in the 6th century, for the Decretum Gelasianum. But there are also other ways to make an anonymous text authoritative, such as entrusting it to a powerful recipient (a pope, a bishop, an abbot). The growth of authorial consciousness from the 11th-12th centuries curbed but did not eliminate anonymous hagiography, which continued to be produced throughout the entire Middle Ages.