Library › Latin: Biography › Vita Beati Landelini
A life of Landelin, the seventh-century confessor associated with the founding of the abbey of Lobbes and other houses in Hainaut, written by Philip of Harvengt at the request of a community. The prologue explains that just as seeing good men moves us to live well, hearing the deeds of those who have died delights the devout listener like sweet music, and that the Church has long had the custom of recording the lives of the saints to be read aloud as examples. The narrative follows Landelin’s conversion and ecclesiastical career: ordained deacon, he travels to Rome to win the favour of the apostles, returns to Cambrai, and is ordained priest by the bishop, then takes up a life of penance.
Like Philip’s other lives of local saints, this work rewrites an older legend in a more elaborate literary style for a monastic audience. Landelin’s story, which includes a youthful period as a brigand before his conversion, was important to the communities that claimed him as founder. The life shows the continuing cult of Merovingian saints in the twelfth-century Low Countries and the role of the Premonstratensians in producing hagiography for their neighbours.
About this edition. The Latin text comes from Corpus Corporum, the Latin text repository of the University of Zurich (edition: Jacques-Paul Migne, Patrologia Latina, vol. 203, Parisiis 1855), reused with attribution for non-commercial purposes (CC BY-NC-SA). Every word has been analyzed with LatinCy, a neural language model for Latin — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from Lewis & Short’s A Latin Dictionary.