Bernard's Life of Sainte Foy is an example of which literary genre?

• A. Saints' Lives
• B. Autobiography
• C. Epic
• D. Chronicle

Answer: (A)

Saints' Lives, a form of hagiography, is what Bernard's Life of Sainte Foy represents. This genre consists of biographies that recount a saint’s virtuous life and miraculous deeds to inspire devotion and support the saint’s cult within medieval religious communities. The Life of Sainte Foy fits this pattern by presenting her pious actions and miracles to promote reverence and local veneration, rather than aiming to document a factual self-portrait or to tell a broad epic tale. It is not an autobiography, since the work is not written by Sainte Foy herself. It is not an epic, which centers on wide-scale heroic adventures, nor a chronicle, which records events in strict chronological order without the devotional framing typical of hagiography.