Hippolyte Delehaye

Hippolyte Delehaye, (19 August 1859 – 1 April 1941) was a Belgian Jesuit who was a hagiographical scholar and an outstanding member of the Society of Bollandists.

Biography Born in 1859 in Antwerp, Delehaye joined the Society of Jesus in 1876, being received into the novitiate the following year. After making his initial profession of religious vows in 1879, he was sent to study philosophy at the University of Louvain from 1879 to 1882. He was then assigned until 1886 to teach mathematics at the Collège Sainte-Barbe in Ghent (named for the school in Paris, alma mater of Ignatius of Loyola). Delehaye was ordained in 1890.

As a consequence, in those years critical method encountered difficulties, within the Jesuit Order, within the Holy Office and among "integrist" opponents of critical approaches. As part of the controls put in place by the Catholic authorities, the Bollandists' scholarly journal Analecta Bollandiana, was subject to censorship by the Holy Office during the years 1901–1927.

These were issues of broader scope that did not prevent Fr Delehaye from continuing as a priest in good standing to pursue his researches with the Bollandists for the greater part of his long life and maintaining his international reputation as a respected and able scholar. He was a member of the Austrian Archaeological Institute, and named Knight of the Order of Leopold. Delehaye wrote a number of articles for the Catholic Encyclopedia.

Books Delehaye's major publications, works of method and synthesis that are of general use to historians, are: Les Légendes hagiographiques, Brüssels 1905, 1906 (translated by Virginia Mary Crawford, 1907, reprinted 1998), 1927. A 1955 French edition was translated by Donald Attwater as The Legends of the Saints (Fordham University Press, 1962). 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: Synaxarium Ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae (Propylaeum ad Acta SS. Novembris), 1902 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 ... (Propylaeum ad Acta SS. Decembris), 194 A commentary on the Roman martyrology, of which Delehaye was the chief editor. Cinq leçons sur la méthode hagiographique, 1934.

Posthumous collections of fugitive pieces were published in 1966 as Mélanges d'hagiographie grecque et latine and in 1991 as L'ancienne hagiographie byzantine: les sources, les premiers modèles, la formation des genres, the previously unpublished texts of lectures delivered in 1935.