Hippolyte Delehaye
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Hippolyte Delehaye (Antwerp August 19, 1859 – Brussels April 1, 1941) was a Belgian Jesuit who was a hagiographic scholar and an outstanding member of the Bollandists, who established critical editions of texts relating to the Christian saints and martyrs that were based on applying the critical method of sound archaeological and documentary scholarship to the texts. Thus he is an exponent of Modernism in the Catholic Church.
He joined the Jesuit Order in 1876 and became a fellow of the Gesellschaft der Bollandisten named for the 17th century hagiographic scholar Jean Bolland in Brussels, 1892. He was an editor of the Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca (1895) a repertory of Greek hagiographies, and of the Analecta Bollandiana and in 1912 became the President of the Bollandists.
His three major publications, works of method and synthesis that are of general use to historians, are:
- Les Légendes hagiographiques, Brüssel 1905 (translated by V. M. Crawford, 1907)
- Les origines du culte des martyrs, 1912
- Les passions des martyrs et les genres littéraires, 1921
- Sanctus. Essai sur le culte des saints dans l'antiquité, 1927
Other important works, with more restricted focus, are:
- Les versions grecques des Actes des martyrs persans sous Sapor II, 1905
- Les Légendes grecques des saints militaires, 1909
- A travers trois siècles: L'Oeuvre des Bollandistes 1615 à 1915, 1920 (translated in 1922)
- Les saints Stylites, 1923
- Martyrologium Romanum ... (Propylseum ad Acta SS. Decembris), 194 A commentary on the Roman martyrology, of which Delehaye was the chief editor.
A posthumous collection of fugitive pieces was published in 1966 as Mélanges d'hagiographie grecque et latine.
A biography by Brigitte Waché was published in 1992.
