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Biography

Short Description

Saint Giles, known in Latin as Aegidius and in French as Gilles, was a Christian hermit and abbot of the early medieval period whose biography rests almost wholly on later legend rather than on contemporary documents. The principal narrative source is the Vita Sancti Aegidii, composed in the tenth century, long after the lifetime traditionally assigned to him. That text presents him as a native of Athens, of noble or even royal blood, living in the seventh century. After the death of his parents he is said to have distributed his wealth to the poor and to have devoted himself to prayer and works of mercy. Desiring a stricter solitude, he left the Greek East. Later tradition traces a westward journey that brought him to the coast of Septimania, in the Visigothic or early Frankish south of what is now France, in the wooded country near Nimes and the mouth of the Rhone.

There he took up the life of a hermit in a cave or remote cell. Hagiography gives him as companion a hind, which according to the legend fed him with her milk. The central miracle of his cult concerns a royal hunt. A king—commonly identified as the Visigothic monarch Wamba, though some versions name a Frankish ruler and still later recensions introduce Charlemagne, an obvious anachronism—was hunting in the forest when his men pursued the hind to the hermit's dwelling. An arrow meant for the animal struck Giles and wounded him. The king discovered the saint, was moved to reverence by his patience and holiness, and offered him gifts of land. Giles consented to receive them only in order that a monastery might be established; he became its abbot. The house is identified with the Abbey of Saint-Gilles at present-day Saint-Gilles-du-Gard. In some accounts the wound never fully healed, which later piety connected with his patronage of the crippled and the disabled.

Little of this story can be confirmed by independent seventh- or eighth-century evidence. Historians generally regard the Athenian origin, the royal genealogy, and the hunt as legendary motifs shaped in the Carolingian or post-Carolingian period. What is historically secure is the existence of a monastery at Saint-Gilles and the rapid growth of a cult centered on the saint's tomb. By the eleventh and twelfth centuries the abbey was a major pilgrimage shrine of Western Christendom and an important station on the roads to Santiago de Compostela. The town that grew around it took the saint's name. Dedication of churches to Giles spread through France, the Low Countries, the Holy Roman Empire, Hungary, Poland, and the British Isles. In Scotland he became patron of Edinburgh, whose principal church is St Giles' Cathedral; in London, St Giles Cripplegate and St Giles-in-the-Fields reflect both his popularity and his association with the poor and the maimed. He was included among the Fourteen Holy Helpers, a group of saints invoked especially in the later Middle Ages against plague and sudden death.

Tradition places his death at his monastery in the early eighth century; no contemporary source fixes a precise year. His feast day in the Roman Martyrology and in Western calendars is 1 September; some Eastern calendars also commemorate him. Because of the arrow, the hind, and his eremitical life, he was invoked as patron of beggars, hermits, forests and woodsmen, horses and rams, blacksmiths and spur-makers, nursing mothers, and those afflicted with epilepsy, mental illness, leprosy, cancer, sterility, and physical disability, as well as against nightmares and the fear of night. Relics were kept at Saint-Gilles; portions were later translated to other churches. Modern scholarship treats the Vita as a work of hagiographical construction rather than a recoverable biography, while recognizing that veneration of Giles is ancient, geographically wide, and deeply rooted in medieval popular religion.

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